LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



DDDDlbflElflD 






V ^^ "0^ ^ 



' '"" %^ 



v\^.-«.^%^ 



\^ /---^^%^ ^l^':'^^ ^4l&V^ 






i^ -^ 



5^-,- .<^ ^ '■V-'^H?^\* oV -^ \ 



.^,:^ -^ ^^^.^^ 






, % ^ 



1^ x:-; 



^^ 0^ :>yA ^= V 0^ .*^^Ia ^= 'V 0^ 



". % 






^o^ 






= %. .^^' .*>vivC= '\..<''' 









^^ ^'^ 









^ ./ ^^^^^^^^ ^ ^i^.^^ ^;,^. 



..^^ 






'1 -' -^.o^ 



'^. 04i^ / .^ o^ 



.•^rr^K.- oN 



.^^ ^ 









.'^^ 












^;^'/'' ^'^-'''-^f^s^^^ %^:^j^ ^^''':f^y^ 






So^ 



.^ ^- 



- t>:^ 



,V ^ 



^ ^^. 



^ % 



V' 



.^' 






^: 









#^ 



rO^ 






^, 



:v /^ ^yW:^^^ ^:ip^:^j/ ^y^^'^^J 

0^.^-'"'% 0^.^^-"'%"' ^.^-"'.% rP^ 






CV \ 



^0^ 



^0^ 



"^AO^ 



.^ ^^^°- 



O- 









%.^ 



^- 



".'p \^ 



.^ ^ '. .-;LJ.,. / «S^ ^ ^ '^W.^ . c^ -^ 



^ 



..jv> -^ %^^fe^.- ,^ .'^ %^%::-5^.- .^- '^ ^ 






_v 






\/- fiMS:%%-^ : 






^^0^ 









A^ ^ 









4 o - 



■-^ ' « O N \ V> O , ' 4 * 

'^ tf t^ « ^xi 
o 'tis 



■,t;t.^^ 



•0^ <!- ^ " , 



















*>^' 



1^ 






5^\^:,*°'<.% ^-^C'«% '^^v:'%% cp\-r: 



^<< 

L*i ^ 



^^d« 



^5«,„ ,^aB- * fC- 




%- 



.^^-mj^^s ^^^ ^ ''/7,s» A<^ ^ "/T^s^ A*^ 



\^'^/vi^\\^ 



A<^ ^ ''TTr^- a"^ <- '''T.o\a<^^ 






%. 0^ " :\^yK^'{S^ ^ 



■^Ad< 



,^9. 



4> 9<. ■ •'4. 






" .«-^ 



/ % %-^s^^^" .^^ -^ 






cS ^ 



\* .<L^ 




.^..i^Si^ 



t'rotn ,in itching by E. Hortrr 

MADISON SQUARE, NEW YORK 



THE PERSONALITY 

== OF == 

AMERICAN CITIES 



BY 



EDWARD P^UNGERFORD 

Author of " The Modern Railroad," 
" Gertrude" etc. 



WITH FRONTISPIECE BY 

E. HORTER 



NEW YORK 

McBRIDE, NAST & COMPANY 

1913 



E:\fe2 
• \\<\^ 



Copyright, 1913, by 
McBride, Nast & Co. 



Published Novei;.iber. 1913 



iCI.AStllJ 3 7 



TO 

MY LITTLE DAUGHTER 

ADRIENNE 



PREFACE 

This book has been in preparation for nearly four 
years. In that time the author has been in each of the 
cities that he has set forth to describe herein. With 
the exception of Charleston, New Orleans and the three 
cities of the North Pacific, he has been in each city two 
or three or even four or five times. 

The task that he has essayed — placing in a single 
chapter even something of the flavor and personality 
of a typical American town — has not been an easy one, 
but he hopes that he has given it a measure of fidelity 
and accuracy if nothing more. Of course, he does not 
believe that he has included within these covers all of 
the American cities of distinctive personality. Such a 
list would include necessarily such clear-cut New 
England towns as Portland, Worcester, Springfield, 
Hartford and New Haven ; it would give heed to the 
solid Dutch manors of Albany; the wonderful develop- 
ment of Detroit, builded into a great city by the develop- 
ment of the motor car; the distinctive features of Mil- 
waukee ; the southern charm of Indianapolis and Cin- 
cinnati and Louisville ; the breezy western atmosphere 
of Omaha and of Kansas City. And in Canada, Winni- 
peg, already proclaiming herself as the " Chicago of 
the Dominion," Vancouver and Victoria demand atten- 
tion. The author regrets that the lack of personal 
acquaintance with the charms of some of these cities, 
as well as the pressure of space, serves to prevent their 
being included within the pages of his book. It is quite 
possible, however, that some or all of them may be in- 
cluded within subsequent editions. 



PREFACE 

The author bespeaks his thanks to the magazine edi- 
tors who were gracious enough to permit him to include 
portions of his articles from their pages. He wishes 
particularly to thank for their generous assistance in 
the preparation of this book, R. C. Ellsworth, and Crom- 
well Childe of New York; C. Armand Miller, D.D., of 
Philadelphia; Nat Olds, formerly of Rochester; Edwin 
Baxter of Cleveland ; and Victor Ross of Toronto. With- 
out their aid it is conceivable that the book would not 
have come into its being. And having aided it, they 
must be content to be known as its foster fathers. 

E. H. 
Brooklyn, New York, September, 1913. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

1. Our Ancient Hub i 

2. America's New York 17 

3. Across the East River 61 

4. William Penn's Town 76 

5. The Monumental City 95 

6. The American Mecca . ... , . . 108 

7. The City of the Seven Hills 127 

8. Where Romance and Courtesy do not For- 

get 135 

9. Rochester — and Her Neighbors . . . 153 

10. Steel's Great Capital 171 

11. The Sixth City 185 

12. Chicago — and the Chicagoans .... 198 

13. The Twin Cities 212 

14. The Gateway of the Southwest. . . . 225 

15. The Old French Lady by the Riverbank . 2^6> 

16. The City of the Little Squares. . . . 256 

17. The American Paris 266 

18. Two Rivals of the North Pacific — and a 

Third 280 

19. San Francisco — The Newest Phcenix . . 288 

20. Belfast in America 307 

21. Where French and English Meet . . . 318 

22. The City that Never Grows Young . . . 332 



THE ILLUSTRATIONS 

Madison Square, New York Frontispiece i^ 

FACING 

PAGE 

Tremont Street, Boston 2 '-^ 

Park Street, Boston 10 »/ 

The Brooklyn Bridge 18 *^ 

View of New York from a Skyscraper 30 '-^ 

Washington Square, New York 46 'X 

A Quiet Street on Brooklyn Heights 64 * 

An old Brooklyn Homestead 72 ^^ 

City Hall, Philadelphia 84 ,/ 

In Baltimore Harbor 96 '• 

Charles Street, Baltimore 

The Union Station, Washington 

The Capitol 

St. Michael's Churchyard, Charleston 

The Erie Canal, in Rochester 

A Home in Rochester 

Syracuse — the canal 

The waterfront, Pittsburgh 

One of Cleveland's broad avenues 

Michigan Avenue and lake- front, Chicago 204 t^' 

The River at St. Paul 220 ^ 

Entrance to the University, St. Louis 226 t' 

A home in the newer St. Louis 232 ^''' 

Steamboat at the New Orleans levee 244 ♦ 



102 


{/^ 


114 


1 ■■■ 


122 




146 


1/ 


154 


i/ 


160 


1/ 


168 


i^ 


180 i/ 


192 


1/ 



THE ILLUSTRATIONS 



FACING 
PAGE 



The big cathedral, San Antonio 256'' 

San Juan Mission, San Antonio 262 v/ 

The arch at 17th Street, Denver 270 s/ 

Seattle, Puget Sound and the Olympics 282 J 

Where the Pacific rolls up to San Francisco 294 1/ 

The Mission Dolores, San Francisco 302 \ 

A Church parade in Montreal 320 / 

Looking from the Terrace into Lower Quebec 334 y/ 

Four Brethren upon the Terrace 340 v 



THE PERSONALITY OF 
AMERICAN CITIES 



THE PERSONALITY OF 
AMERICAN CITIES 



OUR ANCIENT HUB 

THERE are more things forbidden in Boston than 
in Berlin — and that is saying much. You may 
be a citizen of a republic, but when you come to the old 
Bay State town you suddenly realize that you are being 
ruled. At each park entrance is posted a code of rules 
and regulations that would take a quarter of an hour to 
read and digest ; in the elevated and trolley cars, in pub- 
lic institutions and churches, even in shops and hotels, the 
canons laid down for your conduct are sharp in detail 
and unvarying in command. You may not whistle in a 
public park, nor loiter within a subway station, nor pray 
aloud upon the Charlesbank. And for some reason, 
which seems delightfully unreasonable to a man without 
the pale, you may not take an elevated ticket from an 
elevated railroad station. It is to be immediately de- 
posited within the chopping-box before you board your 
train. As to what might happen to a hapless human who 
emerged from a station with a ticket still in his posses- 
sion, the Boston code does not distinctly state. 

And yet — like most tightly ruled principalities — 
Boston's attractiveness is keen even to the unregulated 
mind. The effect of many rules and sundry regulations 
seems to be law and order — to an extent hardly reached 
in any other city within the United States. The Bos- 



2 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

tonian is occasionally rude ; these occasions are almost in- 
variably upon his overcrowded streets and in the public 
places — until the stranger may begin to wonder if, after 
all, the street railroad employes have a monopoly of good 
manners — but he is always just. His mind is judicial. 
He treats you fairly. And if he knows you, knows your 
forbears as well, he is courtesy of the highest sort. And 
there is no hospitality in the land to be compared with 
Boston hospitality — once you have been admitted to its 
portals. 

So we have come in this second decade of the twen- 
tieth century to speak of the inner cult of the Boston 
folk as Brahmins. The term is not new. But in the 
whole land there is not one better applied. For almost 
as the high caste of mystic India hold themselves aloof 
from even the mere sight of less favored humans, do 
these great, somber houses of Beacon street and the rest 
of the Back Bay close their doors tightly to the stranger. 
Make no mistake as to this very thing. You rarely read 
of Boston society — her Brahmin caste — in the columns 
of her newspapers. There are, of course, distinguished 
Boston folk whose names ring there many times — a 
young girl who through her athletic triumphs and her 
sane fashion of looking at life forms a good example for 
her sisters across the land ; a brilliant broker, with an 
itching for printer's ink, who places small red devils 
upon his stationery ; a society matron who must always 
sit in the same balcony seat at the Symphony concerts, 
and who houses in her eccentric Back Bay home perhaps 
the finest private art gallery in America. These folk 
and many others of their sort head the so-called " So- 
ciety columns " of the Sunday newspapers. But the real 
Bostonese do not run to outre stationery or other eccen- 
tricities. They live within the tight walls of their som- 
ber, simple, lovely old red-brick houses, and thank God 
that there were days that had the names of Winthrop 




Boston's Fia Sacre — Tremont Street — and Park 
Street church 



BOSTON 3 

or Cabot or Adams or Peabody spelled in tinted letters 
along the horizon. 

A. M. Howe, who knows his Boston thoroughly, once 
told of two old ladies there who always quarreled as 
to which should have the first look at the Transcript each 
evening. 

" I want to see if anybody nice has died in the 
Transcript this evening," the older sister would say as 
she would hear the thud of the paper against the stout 
outer door, — and after that the battle was on. 

We always had suspected Mr, Howe of going rather 
far in this, until we came to the facts. It seems that 
there were two old ladies in Cambridge, which — as every 
one ought to know, is a sort of scholastic annex to Bos- 
ton — and that they never quarreled — save on the matter 
of the first possession of the Transcript. On that vexed 
question they never failed to disagree. The matter was 
brought to the attention of the owners of the news- 
paper — and they settled it by sending an extra copy of 
the Transcript each evening, with their compliments. 
And that could not have happened anywhere else in this 
land save on the shores of Massachusetts Bay. 

Yet these old Bostonians the chance visitor to the city 
rarely, if ever, sees. They are conspicuous by their 
very absence. He will not find them lunching in the 
showy restaurants of the Touraine or in its newest com- 
petitor farther up Boylston street. They shrink. He 
may sometime catch a glimpse of a patrician New Eng- 
land countenance behind the window-glass of a carriage- 
door, or even see the Brahmins quietly walking home 
from church through the sacred streets of the Back Bay 
on a Sunday morning, but that is all. The doors of the 
old houses upon those streets are tightly closed upon 
him. 

But if one of those doors will open ever and ever so 
tiny a crack to him, it will open full-wide, with the gen- 



4 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

erous width of New England hospitality, and bid him 
enter. We remember dining in one of these famous 
old houses two or three seasons ago. It was in the 
heart of winter — a Boston winter — and the night was 
capriciously changing from rain to sleet and sleet to 
rain again. The wind blew in from the sea with that 
piercing sharpness, so characteristic of Boston. It bent 
the bare branches of the old trees upon the Common, sent 
swinging overhead signs to creaking and shrieking in their 
misery, played sad havoc with unwary umbrellas, and 
shot the flares from the bracketed gas-lamps along the 
streets into all manner of fanciful forms. In such a 
storm we made our way through streets of solid brick 
houses up the hill to the famous Bulfinch State House and 
then down again through Mount Vernon street and Lou- 
isburg square — highways that once properly flattened 
might have been taken from Mayfair or Belgravia. 
Finally our path led to a little street, boasting but eight 
of the stolid brick houses and arranged in the form of 
a capital T. The shank of the T gave that little colony 
its sole access to the remainder of the world. 

To one of these eight old houses — an austere fellow 
and the product of an austere age — we were asked. 
When its solid door closed behind us, we were in 
another Boston. Not that the interior of the house be- 
lied its stolid front. It was as simple as yellow tintings 
and bare walls might ever be. But the few pieces of 
furniture that were scattered through the generous rooms 
were real furniture, mahogany of a sort that one rarely 
ever sees in shops or auction-rooms, the canvases that 
occasionally relieved those bare walls were paintings that 
would have graced even sizeable public collections. The 
dinner was simple — compared with New York stand- 
ards — but the hospitality was generous, even still com- 
pared with the standards of New York. To that infor- 
mal dinner had been bidden a group of Boston men and 



BOSTON 5 

women fairly representative of the town, a Harvard pro- 
fessor of real renown, the editor of an influential daily 
newspaper, a barrister of national reputation, a sociol- 
ogist whose heart has gone toward her work and made 
that work successful. These folk, exquisite in their 
poise because of their absolute simplicity, discussed the 
issues of the moment — the city's progress in the play- 
ground movement, the possibilities of minimum wage 
laws, the tragic devotion of Mrs. Pankhurst and her 
daughter to woman suffrage. In New York a similar 
group of folk similarly gathered would have discussed 
the newest and most elaborate of hotels or George M. 
Cohan's latest show. 

It is this very quality that makes Boston so different 
— and so delightful. She may look like a cleanly Lon- 
don, as she often boasts — with her sober streets of red 
brick — and yet she still remains, despite the great 
changes that have come to pass in the character of her 
people within the past dozen years — a really American 
town. A few hours of study of the faces upon the 
streets and in the public conveyances will confirm this. 
And perhaps it is this very fact that makes a certain, well- 
known resident of the Middle West come to Boston once 
or twice each year without any purpose than his own 
announced one of dwelling for a few days within a 
" really civilized community." 

We well remember our first visit to Boston some — 
twenty years ago. We came over the Boston & Albany 
railroad down into the old station in Kneeland street. 
For it was before the day that those two mammoth and 
barnlike terminals, the North and the South stations, 
had been built. In those days the railroad stations of 
Boston expressed more than a little of her personality — 
even the dingy ark of the Boston & Maine which thrust 
itself out ahead of all its competitors along Causeway 



6 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

street and reached into Haymarket square. The Provi- 
dence station in Park square and the Lowell and the 
Albany stations bespoke in pretentious architecture some- 
thing of the importance and elegance of those three 
railroads, while as for the gray stone castellated station 
of the Fitchburg railroad — that sublimated passenger- 
house made timid travelers almost feel that they were 
gazing at the East portal of the Hoosic tunnel itself. It 
originally held a great hall — superimposed above the 
train-shed — and in that hall Jenny Lind sang when first 
she came to Boston. Afterwards it was decided that a 
concert hall over a noisy train-house was hardly a happy 
ingenuity and it was torn out. By that time, however, 
the Fitchburg station had taken its place in the annals 
of Boston. 

But the Fitchburg railroad, even in its palmiest days, 
was never to be compared with " the Albany." Even the 
railroad to Providence, with its forty-five miles of well- 
nigh perfect roadbed, over which the trains thundered 
in fifty-five minutes, even a half century ago, was not to 
be mentioned in the same breath with the Boston & Al- 
bany. There zvas a railroad. And even if its charter 
did compel it to pay back to the commonwealth of Massa- 
chusetts every penny that it earned in excess of eight 
per cent, dividends upon its stock, that was not to be 
counted against it. It had never the least difficulty in 
earning more than that sum and, as far as we know, it 
never paid the state any money. But the commonwealth 
of Massachusetts did not lose. It gained a high-grade 
railroad — in the day when America hardly knew the 
meaning of such a term. The stations along " the Al- 
bany " were rare bits of architecture while the average 
railroad depot, even in good-sized towns, was a dingy, 
barnlike hole. It ripped out wooden and iron bridges 
by the dozens along its main line and branches and set the 



BOSTON 7 

pace for the rest of the country by building stout stone- 
arch bridges — of the sort that last the centuries. These 
things, and many others, were typical of the road. 

The Boston & Albany was unique in the fact that each 
stockholder who lived along its lines received as a yearly 
perquisite a pass to the annual meeting in Boston. The 
annual meetings were always well attended. Staid col- 
lege professors, remembering the joys of Boston book 
shops, old ladies wearing black bombazine, tiny bonnets 
and prim expressions — all these and many others, too, 
looked forward to the annual meeting of their railroad 
as a child looks forward to Christmas. 

This is not the time or place to discuss the vexatious 
railroad situation in New England, but it is worth while 
to note that when the New York Central railroad leased 
the Boston & Albany — a little more than a dozen years 
ago — and began blotting out the familiar name upon the 
engines and the cars, a wave of sentimental anger swept 
over Boston that it had hardly known since it had in- 
flamed over slavery and laid the foundations for the 
greatest internecine conflict that the world has ever 
known. Boston held no quarrel with the owners of the 
New York Central — if they would only not disturb the 
traditions of its great railroad. But the owners of the 
New York Central did not understand. It was not them. 
It was that word " New York " being blazoned before 
Boston eyes that was making the trouble. The old town 
had seen the Boston & Providence and then, horror of 
horrors, the New England disappear before a railroad that 
called itself the New York, New Haven & Hartford. 
And after these the offense was being created against its 
pet railroad — the Boston & Albany. 

The other day the New York Central saw a great light. 
And in that mental brilliancy it gave back to Boston its 
old railroad. As this is being written " Boston & Al- 



8 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

bany " is reappearing upon whole brigades of engines and 
regiments of freight and passenger cars. A friendly 
sentiment, reared in traditions, has not been slow to show 
its appreciation of the act of the railroad in New York. 
And the men in charge of the great consolidation of the 
other railroads east of the Hudson river have not been 
slow to follow in their action. They have announced that 
they plan to build their railroads into one great system 
called the " New England Lines." It begins to look as 
if, after all these years, they have begun to read the 
Boston mind. 

We have strayed far from our text — from our long 
ago early visit to Boston. Our first impression of the 
town then came from a policeman whom we saw in the 
old Kneeland street station. The policeman had white 
side-whiskers and he wore gold-bowed spectacles. We 
have never, either before or after our first arrival in Bos- 
ton, seen a policeman adorned, either simultaneously or 
separately, with white " mutton-chops " or gold-bowed 
spectacles, and so it was that this Bostonian made a dis- 
tinct impression. Boston, itself, made many impressions. 
Twenty years ago many of the institutions of the town 
that have since disappeared, still remained. True it is 
that the horse-cars were going from Tremont street, for 
the first of the diminutive subways that have kept the city 
years ahead of most American towns in the solution of her 
intra-urban transportation problems had been completed 
and was a nine-days' marvel to the land. The coldly gray 
" Christian Science Cathedral," with its wonderful Sun- 
day congregations, could hardly have existed then, even 
as a dream in the mind of its founder. And the Boston 
Museum still existed. To be sure, many of its glories in 
the days of William Warren and Annie Clarke had dis- 
appeared and it was doomed a few months later to such 
attractions as the booking syndicates might allot it, but 



BOSTON 9 

Its row of exterior lamps still blazed in Tremont street: 
until in June, 1903, it rang down its green baize curtains 
and closed its historic doors for the last time. 

And yet Boston has not changed greatly in twenty years 
— not in outward appearance at least. When she builds 
anew she builds with reverent regard for her ideals and 
her past traditions. Her architects must be steeped in 
both. Nearly twenty years ago she builded her first sky- 
scraper — a modest and dignified affair of but twelve 
stories — and was then so shocked at her own audacity 
that she promised to be very, very good for ever after 
and never to do anything of that sort again. So when 
she found that a new hotel going up near Copley Square 
had overstepped her modest limit of seven stories — or is 
it eight ? — she showed that she could have firmness in 
her determination. She chopped the cornice and the 
upper story boldly off the new hotel, and so it stands to- 
day, as if someone had passed a giant slicing-knife cleanly 
over the structure. 

So it is that Boston still holds to her attractive sky- 
line, the exquisite composition of such distinctive thor- 
oughfares as Park street from the fine old church at 
Tremont street up the hill to Beacon street, the pillared, 
yellow front of the old State House; still keeps her 
meeting-houses with their delicate belfried spires stand- 
ing guard upon her many hilltops ; maintains the rich 
traditions of her history in the infinite detail of her 
architecture — in some bit of wall or section of iron 
fence, in the paneling of a door, the set of a cupola, the 
thrust of a street-lamp, and even in the chimney-pots 
that thrust themselves on high to the attention of the 
man upon the pavement. She cherishes her memories. 
And when she builds anew she does not forget her 
ideals. 

She never forgets her ideals. And if at times they may 
lead her to regard herself a bit too seriously, they make 



10 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

for the old town one of the things that too many other 
American towns lack — a real and distinctive person- 
ality. For instance, take her public houses, her taverns 
and inns. They are notable in the fact that they are 
distinctive — and something more. In a day and age 
when the famous American hotels of other days and 
generations and the things for which they stood, have 
been rather forgotten in the strife to imitate a certain 
type of New York skyscraper hotel, the Boston hotels 
still stand distinctive. Not that the New York type of 
skyscraper is not excellent. It must have had its strong 
points to have been so copied across the land. But if 
all the hotels in every town, big and little, are to be fash- 
ioned in the essentials from the same mold what is to 
become of the zest for travel? You travel for variety's 
sake, otherwise you might as well go to the local sky- 
scraper hotel in your own town and save railroad fare 
and other transportation expenses. 

But no matter what may be true of other towns, the 
Boston hotels are different. " I like the Quincy House 
for its sea-fud," said an old legislator from Sandisfield 
more than forty years ago, and as for the Tremont 
House, turn the pages of your " American Notes " and 
recall the praise that Charles Dickens gave that not-to-be- 
forgotten hostelry. It was one of the very few things in 
the earlier America that did not seem to excite his entire 
contempt. , 

The Tremont House has gone — it disappeared under 
the advance of modernity in the serpent-like guise of the 
first subway in America, creeping down in front of it. 
But other hotels of the old Boston remain a'plenty, the 
staid Revere House, Parker's, Young's, the Adams 
House, — ages seem to have mellowed but not lessened 
their comforts to the traveler. Where else can one find 
a catalogue of the hotel library hanging beside his dresser 
when he retires to the privacy of his room, not a library 




u 



a 



BOSTON II 

crammed with " best-sellers " like these itinerant institu- 
tions on the limited trains, but filled with real books of a 
far more solid sort — where else such wisdom on tap 
in a tavern — but Boston? And if the traveler fails to 
be schooled to such possibilities, we might ask where 
else in Christendom can he get boiled scrod, or Wash- 
ington pie, or fish balls, or cod tongues with bacon, or 
that magna charta of the New England appetite, that 
Plymouth rock from which has come all the virtues of 
its sturdy folk, baked beans with brown bread? Eat- 
ing in Boston is good. In these things it is superlative. 
And it is pleasing to know that Boston's newest hotel — 
the Copley-Plaza — perhaps the finest hotel in America, 
since it has discarded new-fashioned details for the 
old — observes the traditions of the town in which it 
truly earns its bread and butter. 

And if the traveler have magic sesame, the clubs of 
the old town may open to him, clubs with spotless in- 
tegrity and matchless service, all the way from the 
stately Somerset and the Algonquin through to the dem- 
ocratic City Club — with its more than four thousand 
enthusiastic members. This last is perhaps the most 
representative of Boston clubs. Its old house — un- 
fortunately soon to be vacated — stands in Beacon 
street, within a stone's throw of King's Chapel and Tre- 
mont street. It is a rare old house ; two houses in fact, 
lending tenderly to the Boston traditions of delicate bow 
fronts and severity of ornament. Its rooms are broad 
and long and low, filled with hospitable tables and com- 
fortable Windsor chairs. In its great fireplace hickory 
logs crackle and the New England tradition of an ash- 
bank is preserved to the minutest detail. Its dun-col- 
ored walls are lined with rare prints and old photographs 
— pictures for the most part of that old Boston which 
was and which never again can be. The dishes that 
come out from its kitchen are from the best of tradi- 



12 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

tional New England recipes. And as your host leads 
you out from the dining-room he delves deep into a 
barrel and brings out two bright red apples. He hands 
you one. 

" We New England folk think that most of the real 
virtues of life are seated in red apples," he says — and 
there is something in his way of saying it that makes you 
believe that he is right. 

Another day and he may lead you to still another club 
— this one down under the roof of one of those solid old 
stone warehouses with steep-pitched roofs that thrust 
themselves abruptly out into the harbor-line. It is a 
yacht club, and its fortress-like windows, shaped like the 
port-holes of a ship, look direct to a brisk water highway 
to the open sea. Underneath those very windows is the 
rush and turmoil of one of the busiest fish markets in 
the land. There is nothing on either coast, no, not even 
down in the picturesque Gulf that can compare with this 
place, which reeks with the odors and where the fisher- 
men handle the cod with huge forks and paint the decks 
of their staunch little vessels a distinctive color to show 
the nationality of the folk who man it. We remember 
that the Portuguese have a whimsical fancy for painting 
the decks of their little fishing schooners a most unusual 
blue. 

Of Boston harbor an entire book might easily be 
written — of the quaint craft that still tie to its wharves, 
the brave show of shipping that passes in and out each 
day, of Boston Light and that other silent, watchful 
sentinel which stands upon Minot's Ledge ; of the Navy 
Yard over in Charlestown at which the Constitution, 
most famous of all fighting-ships, rusts out her fighting 
heart through the long years. And looking down upon 
that old Navy Yard from Boston itself is Copp's Hill 
burying-ground, a rich grubbing-place for the seekers of 
epitaphs and of genealogical lore. We remember once 



BOSTON 13 

winning the heart of the keeper of the old cemetery and 
of being permitted to descend to the vault of one of the 
oldest of Boston families. In the dark place there were 
three little groups of bones and we knew that only three 
persons had been buried there. 

Above, the sunshine beat merrily down upon Copp's 
Hill, with its headstones arranged in neat rows along 
the tidy paths and the elevated trains in an encircling 
street fairly belying the bullets in the stones — shot 
there from Bunker Hill a century and a quarter be- 
fore. . . . There are many other such burying-grounds 
in Boston — in the very heart of the city the Granary 
and King's Chapel burying-ground where a great owl 
sometimes comes at dusk and opens his eyes wide 
at the traffic of a great city encircling one of God's 
acres. And a soul that revels in these things will, per- 
chance, journey to Salem, seventeen miles distant, and 
see the moldering seaport that once rivaled Boston in 
her prosperity and that sent her clipper ships sailing 
around the wide world. There are many delightful 
side-trips out from Boston — the sail across the tumbling 
bay to Provincetown, which still boasts a town crier, 
down to Plymouth or up to Gloucester, with its smart, 
seaside resorts nearby. And back from Boston there are 
other moldering towns, filled with fascination and ro- 
mance. Some of them have hardly changed within the 
century. 

Even Boston does not change rapidly. Thank God 
for that ! She keeps well to the old customs and the 
old traditions, holds tightly to her ideals. Only in the 
folk who walk her awkward streets can the discerning 
man see the new Boston. The old types of Brahmins 
are outclassed. Some of them still do amazingly well in 
the professions but these are few. Long ago the steady 
press of immigration at the port of Boston took political 
power away from them. Yet the old guard stands reso- 



14 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

lute. And the impress of its manners is not lost upon 
the Boston of to-day. 

For instance, take the vernacular of the town. Bos- 
ton has a rather old-fashioned habit of speaking the 
English language. It came upon us rather suddenly one 
day as we journeyed out Huntington avenue to the 
smart new gray and red opera house. The very color- 
ings of the foyer of that house — soft and simple — be- 
spoke the refinement of the Boston to-day. 

In the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, in every 
other one of the big opera houses that are springing up 
mushroom-fashion across the land, our ears would have 
been assailed by " Librettos ! Get your librettos ! " Not 
so in Boston. At the Boston Opera House the young 
woman back of the foyer stand calmly announced at 
clock-like intervals : 

" Translations. Translations." 

And the head usher, whom the older Bostonians 
grasped by the hand and seemed to regard as a long- 
lost friend, did not sip out, " Checks, please." 

" Locations," he requested, as he condescended to the 
hand-grasps of the socially elect. 

" The nearer door for those stepping out," announces 
the guard upon the elevated train and as for the surface 
trolley-cars, those wonderful green perambulators laden 
down with more signs than nine ordinary trolley-cars 
would carry at one time, they do not speak of the newest 
type in Boston as " Pay-as-you-enter cars," after the 
fashion of less cultured communities. In the Hub they 
are known as Prepayment cars — its precision is unre- 
lenting. 

All of these things make for the furthering of the 
charm of Boston. They are tangible assets and even 
folk from the newer parts of the land are not slow to 
realize them as such — remember that man from the 
Middle West who makes a journey once or twice each 



BOSTON 15 

year to be in the very heart of civilization. There was 
another Westerner — this man a resident of Omaha, who 
sent his boy — already a graduate of a pretty well-known 
university near Chicago — to do some post-graduate work 
at Harvard. A few weeks later he had a letter from his 
son. It read something after this fashion : 

" It seems absurd, Dad, but Harvard does have some 
absurd regulations. In fine, they won't let me go out 
in a shell or boat of any sort upon the river without 
special written permission from you. Will you fix me 
up by return mail and we will both try to forget this 
fool undergraduate regulation, etc. ..." 

That regulation struck Daddy about as it had hit Sonny. 
But he hastened to comply with the request. When he 
had finished, he felt that he had turned out quite a 
document, one that would be enjoyed in the faculty and 
perhaps framed and hung up in some quiet nook. It 
read: 

" To all whom it may concern : 

This is to certify that my son, John Japson Jones, is hereby 
authorized and permitted to row, swim, dive or otherwise disport 
himself upon, above or under the waters of the Charles river, 
Massachusetts bay and waters adjacent to them until especially 
revoked. Given under my hand and seal at the city of Omaha 

in the state of Nebraska, on the th day of October, 19... 

(Signed) JAMES JONES." 

Then James Jones awaited the consequences. It was 
not long after that the letter came from John Japson. 

" — How could you do it. Dad? " he demanded. " You 
don't know these folks. They're not our sort. They 
don't know humor. They're afraid of it. The only man 
I dared to show that awful thing to was the janitor and 
he stuck up his nose. ' Guess your pop must have been 
a little full,' was his comment." 

James Jones decided to come to Boston forthwith. He 
wanted to see for himself what sort of a community 
John Japson had strayed into. He did see Boston, Cam- 



i6 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

bridge too, to his heart's content. Boston was his par- 
ticular delight. Two of its citizens took the gentleman 
from Omaha well in hand. They showed him the Frog 
Pond — it was just before the season when they remove 
the Frog Pond for the season and put down the board- 
walks in the Common — and they showed him the crook- 
edest streets of any town upon the American continent. 
They filled him with beans and with codfish, tickled his 
palate with the finest Medford rum. He mingled and he 
browsed and before they were done with him his barbaric 
soul became enraptured, 

"Boston is great," he admitted, frankly. Then, in an 
afterthought, he added: 

" I think that I should like to call her the Omaha of 
the East." 

The owl still comes on cloudy, troubled nights and 
sits in a high tree-limb pbove the quiet graves in the 
graveyard of King's Chapel. When he comes he sees 
the tardiest of the Boston men, carrying the green bags, 
that their daddies and their granddaddies before them 
carried, as they go slipping down the School street hill. 
He is a very old owl and he loves the old town — loves 
each of its austere meeting-houses with their belfried 
towers, loves the meeting places behind the rows of chim- 
ney-pots, the open reaches of the Common and the 
adjoining Public Gardens, where children paddle in the 
swan-boats all summer long. He loves the tang and mist 
of the nearby sea, but best of all he likes the tree-limb 
in the old graveyard, the part of Boston that stands 
changeless through the years — that thrusts itself into the 
very face of modernity with the grimy stone cliurch at 
its corner and seems to say: 

" I am the Past. To the Past, Reverence." 
And in Boston Modernity halts many times to make 
obeisance to the Past. 



2 

AMERICA'S NEW YORK 



BEFORE the dawn, metropolitan New York is astir. 
As a matter of far more accurate fact she never 
sleeps. You may call her the City of the Sleepless Eye 
and hit right upon the mark. For at any time of the 
lonely hours of the night she is still a busy place. Ele- 
vated and subway trains and surface cars, although 
shortened and reduced in number, are upon their ways 
and are remarkably well filled. Regiments of men are 
engaged in getting out the morning papers — in a dozen 
different languages of the sons of men — and another 
regiment is coming on duty to lay the foundations of 
the earliest editions of the evening papers. There are 
workers here and there and everywhere in the City of 
the Sleepless Eye. 

But before the dawn. New York becomes actively 
astir. Lights flash into dull radiance in the rows of 
side-street tenement and apartment houses all the way 
from Brooklyn bridge to Bronx Park. New York is 
beginning to dress. Other lights flash into short bril- 
liancy before the coming of the dawn. New York is 
beginning to eat its breakfast. And right afterwards 
the stations of the elevated and the subway, the corners 
where the speeding surface cars will sometimes hesitate, 
become the objects of attack of an army that is marching 
upon the town. Workaday New York is stretching its 
arms and settling down to business. 

Nor is the awakening city to be confined to the narrow 

17 



i8 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

strip of island between the North and East rivers. Over 
on Long island are Brooklyn, Long Island City, Flush- 
ing, Jamaica and a score of other important places now 
within the limits of Greater New York. Some folk 
find it more economical to live in these places than in the 
cramped confines of Manhattan, and so it is hardly dawn 
before the great bridges and the tubes over and under 
the East river are doing the work for which they were 
built — and doing it masterfully. 

The Brooklyn bridge is the oldest of these and yet it 
has been bending to its superhuman task for barely 
thirty years. In these thirty years it has been constantly 
reconstructed — but the best devices of the engineers, 
doubling and tripling the facilities of the original struc- 
ture, can hardly keep pace with the growth of the com- 
munities and the traffic it has to serve. So within these 
thirty years other bridges and two sets of tunnels have 
come to span the East river. But the work of the first 
of all man's highways to conquer the mighty water high- 
way has hardly lessened. The oldest of the bridges, and 
the most beautiful despite the ugliness of its approaches, 
still pours Brooklynites into Park Row, fifty, sixty, 
seventy thousand to the hour. 

The overloading of the Brooklyn bridge is repeated 
in the subway — that hidden giant of New York, which 
is the real backbone of the island of Manhattan. Built 
to carry four hundred thousand humans a day, that busy 
railroad has begun to carry more than a million each 
working day. How it is done, no one, not even the en- 
gineers of the company that operates it, really knows. 
The riders in the great tube who have to use it during 
the busiest of the rush hours are willing to hazard a 
guess, however. It is probable that in no other railroad 
of the sort would jamming and crowding of this sort be 
tolerated for more than a week. Yet the patrons of the 
subway not only tolerate but, after a fashion, they like 



NEW YORK 19 

it. You can ask a New Yorker about it half an hour 
after his trip down town, sardine- fashion, and he will 
only say : 

"The subway? It's the greatest ever. I can come 
down from Seventy-second street to Wall street in six- 
teen minutes, and in the old days it used to take me 
twenty-six or twenty-seven minutes by the elevated." 

There is your real New Yorker. He would be per- 
fectly willing to be bound and gagged and shot through 
a pneumatic tube like a packet of letters, if he thought 
that he could save twenty minutes between the Battery 
and the Harlem river. No wonder then that he scorns 
a relatively greater degree of comfort in elevated trains 
and surface cars and hurries to the overcrowded sub- 
way. 

But New York astir in the morning is more even than 
Manhattan, the Bronx and the populous boroughs over 
on Long island. Upon its westerly edge runs the Hud- 
son river — New Yorkers will always persist in calling 
it the North river — one of the masterly water high- 
ways of the land. The busy East river had been spanned 
by man twice before any man was bold enough to sug- 
gest a continuous railroad across the Hudson. Now 
there are several — the wonderful double tubes of the 
Pennsylvania railroad leading from its new terminal in 
the uptown heart of Manhattan — and two double sets 
of tunnels of a rapid-transit railroad leading from New 
Jersey both uptown and downtown in Manhattan. This 
rapid transit railroad — the Hudson & Manhattan, to 
use its legal name, although most New Yorkers speak 
of it as the McAdoo Tubes, because of the man who 
had the courage to build it — links workaday New 
York with a group of great railroad terminals that line 
the eastern rim of New Jersey all the way from Com- 
munipaw through Jersey City to Hoboken. And the 
railroads reach with more than twenty busy arms off 



20 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

across the Jersey marshes to rolling hills and incipient 
mountains. Upon those hills and mountains live nearly 
a hundred thousand New Yorkers — men whose busi- 
ness interests are closely bound up in the metropolis of 
the New World but whose social and home ties are laid 
in a neighboring state. These — together with their fel- 
lows from Westchester county, the southwestern corner 
of Connecticut and from the Long island suburban 
towns — measure a railroad journey of from ten to 
thirty miles in the morning, the same journey home at 
night, as but an incident in their day's work. They form 
the great brigade of commuters, as a rule the last of the 
working army of New York to come to business. 

The commuter has his own troubles — sometimes. 
By reason of his self-chosen isolation he may sufifer cer- 
tain deprivations. The servant question is not the least 
of these. And the extremes of a winter in New York 
come hard upon him. There are days when the Eight- 
twenty-two suddenly loses all that reputation for steadi- 
ness and sobriety that it has taken half a year to achieve, 
days when sleepy schooners laden with brick and claim- 
ing the holy right-of-way of the navigator get caught 
in the draw-bridges, days when the sharp unexpectedness 
of a miniature blizzard freezes terminal switches and 
signals and tangles traffic inexplicably — days, and nights 
as well, when the streets of his suburban village are 
well-nigh impassable. But these days are in a tremen- 
dous minority. And even upon the worst of them he 
can put the rush and turmoil of the city behind him — 
in the peace and silence of his country place he can 
forget the sorrows of Harlem yesteryear — with the 
noisy twins on the floor below and the mechanical piano 
right overhead. 

For nearly four hours the steady rush toward work 
continues. You can gauge it by a variety of conditions 



NEW YORK 21 

— even by the newspapers that are being spread wide 
open the length of the cars. In the early morning the 
popular penny papers — the American and the World 
predominating, with a sprinkling of the Press in be- 
tween. Two hours later and while these popular penny 
papers are still being read — they seem to have a par- 
ticular vogue with the little stenographers and the shop- 
girls — the more staid journals show themselves. Men 
who like the solid reading of the Times, with its law 
calendars and its market reports ; men of the town who 
frankly confess to an affection for the flippancy of the 
Sun, or who have not lost the small-town spirit of their 
youth enough to carry them beyond the immensely per- 
sonal tone of the Herald. And in between these, men 
who sniff at the mere mention of the name of Roose- 
velt, and who read the Tribune because their daddies 
and their grand-daddies in their turn read it before 
them, or frankly business souls who are opening the 
day with a conscientious study of the Journal of Com- 
merce or the Wall street sheets. 

New York goes to work reading its newspaper. And 
before you have finished a Day of Days in the biggest 
city of the land you might also see that it goes to lunch 
with a newspaper in its hand, returns home tired with 
the fearful thoughts of business to delve comfortably 
into the gossip of the day in the favorite evening paper. 

Just as you stand at the portals of the business part 
of the town and measure the incoming throng by its 
favorite papers so can you sieve out the classes of the 
workers almost by the hours at which they report for 
duty. In the early morning, in the winter still by 
artificial light, come those patient souls who exist lit- 
erally and almost bitterly by the labor of their hands 
and the sweat of their brows. With them are the 
cleaners and the elevator crews of the great office-build- 
ings — those tremendous commercial towers that New 



22 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

York has been sending skyward for the past quarter 
of a century. On the heels of these the first of the 
workers in the office-buildings, office-boys, young clerks, 
girl stenographers whose wonderful attire is a reflec- 
tion of the glories that we shall see upon Fifth avenue 
later in this day. It is pinching business, literally — 
the dressing of these young girls. But if their faces 
are suspiciously pinky or suspiciously chalky, if their 
pumps and thin silk stockings, their short skirts and 
their open-necked waists atrocious upon a chill and nasty 
morning, we shall know that they are but the reflection 
of their more comfortable sisters uptown. Not all of 
this rapidly increasing army of women workers in busi- 
ness New York is artificial. Not a bit of it. There 
are girls in downtown offices whose refinement of dress 
and deportment, whose exquisite poise, whose well- 
schooled voices might have come from the finest old 
New York houses. And these are the girls who revel 
in their Saturday afternoons uptown — all in the smart- 
ness of best bib and tucker — at the matinee or fussing 
with tea at Sherry's or the Plaza. 

An army of office workers pours itself into the busi- 
ness buildings that line Broadway and its important 
parallel streets all the way from Forty-second street to 
the Battery — that cluster with increasing discomfort 
in the narrow tip of Manhattan south of the City Hall. 
Clerks, stenographers, more clerks, more stenographers, 
now department heads and junior partners — finally the 
big fellows themselves, coming down democratically in 
the short-haul trains of the Sixth avenue elevated that 
start from Fifty-eighth street or even enduring the dis- 
comforts of the subway, for it takes a leisurely sort of 
a millionaire indeed who can afford to come in his motor 
car all the way downtown through the press and strain 
of Broadway traffic. After all these, the Wall street 
men. For the exchange opens at the stroke of ten of 



NEW YORK 23 

Trinity's clock and five brief and bitter hours of trading 
have begun. 

For four hours this flood of humans pouring out of 
the ferry-house and the railroad terminals, up from the 
subway kiosks and out from the narrow stairways of 
the elevated railroads. The narrow downtown streets 
congest, again and again. The sidewalks overflow and 
traffic takes to the middle of the streets. But the great 
office buildings absorb the major portion of the crowds. 
Their vertical railroads — eight or ten or twenty or 
thirty cars — are working to capacity and workaday New 
York is sifting itself to its task. By ten o'clock the 
oflice buildings are aglow with industry — the great ma- 
chine of business starting below the level of the street 
and reaching high within the great commercial towers. 

II 

New York is the City of the Towers. 

Sometimes a well-traveled soul will arise in the 
majesty of contemplation and say that in the American 
metropolis he sees the shadowy ghost of some foreign 
one. Along Madison square, where the cabbies still 
stand in a long, gently-curving, expectant line he will 
draw his breath through his teeth, point with his walk- 
ing stick through the tracery of spring-blossoming 
foliage at Diana on her tower-perch and whisper 
reverently : 

" It is Paris — Paris once again." 

And there is a lower corner of Central Park that 
makes him think of Berlin ; a long row of red brick 
houses with white trimmings along the north shore of 
Washington square that is a resemblance to blocks of 
a similar sort in London. 

But he is quite mistaken. New York does not aim 
to be a replica of any foreign metropolis. She has her 
own personality, her own aggressive individualism ; she 



24 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

is the City of the Towers as well as the City of the Sleep- 
less Eye — and no mean city at that. Take some clever 
European traveler, a man who can find his way around 
any of the foreign capitals with his eyes shut, and let 
him come to New York for the first time ; approach our 
own imperial city through her most impressive gateway 
— that narrow passage from the sea between the ram- 
parts of the guarding fortresses. This man, this trav- 
eler, has heard of the towers of the great New World 
city — they have been baldly pictured to him as giant, 
top-heavy barracks, meaningless compositions of ugly 
blank walls, punctuated with an infinity of tiny windows. 
That is the typical libel that has gone forth about New 
York. 

He sees naught of such. He sees a great city, the 
height of its buildings simply conveying the impression 
from afar that it is builded upon a steep ridge. Here 
and there a building of still loftier height gives accent 
to the whole, emphasis to what might otherwise be a 
colorless mass ; gives that mysterious tone and contrast 
which the artist is pleased to call " composition." Four 
of these towers already rise distinct from the giant sky- 
scrapers of Manhattan. Each for this moment pro- 
claims a victory of the American architect and the Amer- 
ican builder over the most difficult problem ever placed 
before architect or builder. 

The European traveler will give praise to the sky- 
line of New York as he sees it from the steamer's deck. 

" It is the City of the Towers," he will say. 

In this, your Day of Days in New York, come with 
us and see the making of a skyscraper. This skyscraper 
is the new Municipal Building. It is just behind the 
tree-filled park in which stands New York's oldest bit 
of successful architecture — its venerable City Hall. A 
long time before New York dreamed that she might 



NEW YORK 25 

become the City of the Towers they builded this old 
'''^City Hall — upon what was then the northerly edge of 
the town. So sure were those old fellows that New 
York would never grow north of their fine town hall that 
they grew suddenly economical — the spirit of their 
Dutch forbears still dominated them — and builded the 
north wall of Virginia freestone instead of the white 
marble that was used for the facings of the other walls. 
" No one will ever see that side of the building," they 
argued. " We might as well use cheap stone for that 
wall." 

Today more than ninety-nine per cent, of the popula- 
tion of the immensely populated island of Manhattan 
lives north of the City Hall. That cheap north wall, 
hidden under countless coats of white paint, is the 
one acute reminder of the days that were when the 
Hall was new — when the gentle square in which it 
stood was surrounded by the suburban residences of 
prosperous New Yorkers and when the waters of the 
Collect Pond — where the New York boys use to skate 
in the bitterness of old-fashioned winters — lapped its 
northerly edge. There was no ugly Court House or even 
uglier Post Office to block the view from the Mayor's 
office up and down Broadway. New Yorkers were 
proud of their City Hall then — and good cause had they 
for their pride. It is one of the best bits of architec- 
ture in all America. And an even century of hard 
usage and countless " restorations " has only brought to 
it the charm of serene old age. 

But the City Hall long since was outgrown. The mu- 
nicipal government of New York is a vast and somewhat 
unwieldy machine that can hardly be housed within a 
dozen giant structures. To provide offices for the 
greater part of the city's official machinery, this tower- 
ing Municipal Building has just been erected. And 
because it is so typical of the best form of the so-called 



26 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

skyscraper architecture, let us stop and take a look at 
it, listen to the story of its construction. In appearance 
the new Municipal Building is a gray-stone tower 
twenty-five stories in height and surmounted by a tower 
cupola an additional fifteen stories in height. In plan 
the structure is a sort of semi-octagon — a very shallow 
letter " U," if you please. But its most unusual feature 
comes from the fact that it squarely spans one of the 
busiest crosstown highways in the lower part of the 
city — Chambers street. The absorption of that busy 
thoroughfare is recognized by a great depressed bay 
upon the west front — the main facade of the building. 
And incidentally that depressed bay makes interior 
courts within the structure absolutely unnecessary. So 
much for the architectural features, severe in its detail, 
save for some ornate and not entirely pleasing sculp- 
tures. You are interested in knowing how one of these 
giants — so typical of the new New York — are fab- 
ricated. 

This young man — hardly a dozen years out of a big 
technical school — can tell you. He has supervised the 
job. Sometimes he has slept on it — in a narrow cot 
in the temporary draughting-house. He knows its 
every detail, as he knows the fingers of his hands. 

" Just remember that we began by planning a railroad 
station in the basement with eight platform tracks for 
loading and unloading passengers." 

"A railroad station?" you interrupt. 

" Certainly," is his decisive reply. " Downstairs we 
will soon have the most important terminal of a brand 
new subway system crossing the Manhattan and the 
Williamsburgh bridges and reaching over Brooklyn like 
a giant gridiron." 

He goes on to the next matter — this one settled. 

" There was something more than that. We had to 
plant on that cellar a building towering forty stories 



NEW YORK 27 

in the air ; its steel frame alone weighing twenty-six 
thousand tons — more than half the weight of the heav- 
iest steel cantilever bridge in America — had to be 
firmly set." 

The young engineer explains — in some detail. To 
find a foothold for this building was no sinecure. Tests 
with the diamond drill had shown that solid rock rested 
at a depth of 145 feet below street level at the south end 
of the plat. At the north end, the rock sloped away rap- 
idly and so that part of the building rests upon com- 
pact sand. The rock topography of Manhattan island 
is uncertain. There are broad areas where solid gneiss 
crops close to the street level, others where it falls a hun- 
dred feet or more below water level. There is a hidden 
valley at Broadway and Reade street, a deep bowl far- 
ther up Broadway. Similarly, the north extremity of 
the Municipal Building rests upon the edge of still an- 
other granite bowl — the sub-surface of that same Col- 
lect Pond upon which the New York boys used to skate 
a century or more ago. 

" That bothered some folks at first," laughs the engi- 
neer, " but we met it by sinking the caissons. We've 
more than a hundred piers down under this structure 
hanging on to Mother Earth. You don't realize the hold- 
ing force of those piers," he continues. He turns quickly 
and points to a fourteen story building off over the trees 
of City Hall park. Out in one of the good-sized towns 
of the Middle West people would gasp a little at sight 
of it — in New York it is no longer even a tower. 

" Turn that fellow right upside down into the hole 
we dug for this building," says the engineer, " and the 
rim of his uppermost cornice would about reach the 
feet of our own little forest of buried concrete piers." 

That was one detail of the construction of the build- 
ing. Here is another ; the first six stories of the new 
structure involved elaborate masonry, giant stones, much 



28 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

carved. From the seventh story the plain walls of the 
exterior developing into an elaborate cornice were of 
simple construction. If the setting of these upper floors 
had waited until the first six stories of elaborate stone- 
work had been made ready there would have been a 
delay of months in the construction work. So the con- 
tractor began building the walls — which in the modern 
steel skyscraper as you know form no part of the real 
structure but act rather as a stone envelope to keep 
out hard weather — from the seventh story upward. 
Eventually the masons working on the first six stories, 
working upwards all the time, reached and joined the 
lower edge of the masonry that had been set some weeks 
before. Time had been saved and you know that time 
does count in New York. Remember the Wall street 
man who preferred to have his ribs crushed and his hat 
smashed down over his nose in the subway rather than 
lose ten minutes each day in the elevated. 

Now you stand with the young engineer at the top- 
most outlook of the tower in the Municipal Building and 
look down on the busy town. Before you is that mighty 
thoroughfare, Broadway — but so lined with towering 
buildings that you cannot see it, save for a brief space 
as it passes the greenery of the City Hall Park; 
behind you is that still mightier highway — the East 
river. Over that river you see the four bridges — the 
oldest of them landing at your very feet — and 
crawling things upon them, which a second glance shows 
to be trains and trolley-cars and automobiles and wagons 
in an unending succession. Beyond the East river and 
its bridges — the last of these far to the north and 
barely discernible — is Brooklyn, and beyond Brooklyn 
— this time to the south — is a shimmering slender 
horizon of silver that the man beside you tells you is 
the ocean. 

You let your gaze come back to the wonderful view 



NEW YORK 29 

which the building squarely faces. You look down upon 
the towers of New York — big towers and little towers — 
and you lift your eyes over the dingy mansard of the 
old Post Office and see the greatest of all the towers — 
the creamy white structure that a man has builded from 
his profits in the business of selling small articles at five 
and ten cents apiece. It is fifty-five stories in height 
— exquisitely beautiful in detail — and the owner will 
possess for a little time at least, the highest building in 
the world. You can see the towers in every vista, puf- 
fing little clouds of white smoke into the purest blue air 
that God ever gave a city in which to spin her fabrica- 
tions. To the north, the south, the west, they show 
themselves in every infinite variety and here and there 
between them emerge up-shouldering rivals, steel-naked 
in their gaunt frames. If your ears are keen and the 
wind be favorable perhaps you can hear the clatter of 
the riveters and you can see over there the housesmiths 
riding aloft on the swinging girders with an utter and 
immensely professional indifference, threading the slen- 
der, dizzy floor-girders as easily as a cat might tread 
the narrow edge of a backyard fence. 

Off with your gaze again. Look uptown, catch the 
faint patch of dark green that is Central Park, the spires 
of the cathedral, the wonderful campanile at Madison 
square. Let your glance swing across the gentle Hud- 
son, over into a New Jersey that is bounded by the 
ridges of the Orange mountains, then slowly south and 
even the great towers that thrust themselves into almost 
every buildable foot of Broadway below the City Hall 
cannot entirely block your view of the wonderful upper 
harbor of New York — of the gieat ships that bring to 
an imperial city the tribute that is rightfully hers. 

Now let your vision drop into the near foreground — 
into the tracery of trees about the jewel-box of a City 
Hall. Let it pause for a moment in the broad-paved 



30 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

street at your feet with the queer little openings through 
which humans are sweeping like a black stream into a 
funnel ; others from which the human streams come 
crawling upward like black molasses and you are again 
reminded that some of the greatest highways of New 
York are those that are subterranean and unseen. The 
sidewalks grow a little blacker than before. 

" It's lunch-time," laughs the young engineer. 

Bless you, it is. The morning that you gave to one 
of the most typical of the towers has not been ill-spent. 

Ill 

Thirty minutes before the big bell of Trinity spire 
booms out noon-tide New York's busiest grub-time be- 
gins. A few early-breakfasting clerks and office-boys 
begin to find their way toward the shrines of the coffee- 
urns and the heaped-up piles of sandwiches. 

Of course, in New York breakfast is an almost end- 
less affair — generally a fearfully hurried one. But 
lunch is far more serious. Lunch is almost an institu- 
tion. Fifteen minutes after it is fairly begun it is gain- 
ing rapid headway. Thin trails of stenographers and 
clerks are finding their ways, lunch-bound, through the 
canyon-like streets of lower Manhattan, streams that 
momentarily increase in volume. By the time that 
Trinity finally boor^is its twelve stout strokes down into 
Broadway there is congestion upon the sidewalks — the 
favorite stools at the counters, the better tables in the 
higher-priced places are being rapidly filled. At twelve- 
thirty it begins to be luck to get any sort of accommoda- 
tions at the really popular places ; before one o'clock the 
intensity of grubbing verges on panic and pandemonium. 
And at a little before three cashiers are totaling their 
receipts, cooks, donning their hats and coats to go uptown, 
and waiters and 'buses are upturning chairs and scrub- 
bing floors with scant regard for belated lunchers who 



NEW YORK 31 

have to be content with the crumbs that are left after 
the ravishing and hungry army has been fed. Order 
after pandemonium — readiness for the two hours of 
gorge upon the morrow. The restaurants and lunch- 
rooms are as quiet as Trinity church-yard and some- 
thing like three quarters of a million hungry souls have 
lunched in the business section of Manhattan south of 
Twenty-third street — at a total cost, according to the 
estimate of a shrewd restauranteur of a quarter of a 
million dollars. 

You may pay your money and take your choice. The 
shrewd little newsboys and office-boys who find their 
way to the short block of Ann street between Park Row 
and Nassau — the real Grub street of New York — are 
proving themselves financiers of tomorrow by dickering 
for sandwiches — " two cents apiece ; three for a nickel." 
They always buy them in lots of three. That is busi- 
ness and business is not to be scorned for a single in- 
stant. Or you can pay as high prices in the swagger 
restaurants downtown as you do in the swagger res- 
taurants uptown — and that is saying much. When 
lunch-time comes you can suit the inclinations of your 
taste — and your pocket-book. But the average New 
Yorker seems to run quite strongly to the peculiar form 
of lunch-room in which you help yourself to what you 
want, compute from the markers the cost of your mid- 
day meal, announce that total to the cashier, who is 
perfectly content to take your word for it, pay the 
amount and walk out. It seems absurd — to any one 
who does not understand New Yorkers. The lunch- 
room owners do understand them. New York business 
men and business boys are honest, as a general thing — 
particularly honest in little matters of this sort. 

" It is all very simple," says the manager of one of 
these big lunch-rooms, who stands beside you for a 



32 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

moment at the entrance of one of his places — it boasts 
that it serves more than two thousand lunches each busi- 
ness day between eleven and three. " I've been through 
the whole mill. I've been check boy and oyster 
man, cashier — now I'm looking out for this particular 
beanery. Honor among New York business men? 
There's a lot of it." 

" And you don't run many risks ? " you venture. 

" Not many here," he promptly replies. " But there 
was a man in here yesterday, who runs a cafeteria out 
in Chicago. I was telling him some of the rules of the 
game here — how when a customer comes in and throws 
his hat down in a chair before he goes over to the sand- 
wich and coffee counters that chair is his, until he gets 
good and ready to go. My Chicago friend laughed at 
that. ' If we were to do that out in my neck-o'-the- 
woods,' says he, ' the customer would lose his hat.' And 
the uptown department stores don't take any chances, 
either. At one of the biggest of them they make the 
women decide what they will eat, but before they can 
start they must buy a check — pay in advance, you 
understand. They've tried the downtown way — and 
now they take no chances." 

The floor manager laughs nervously. 

" It's different with the girls downtown. We've 
started one quick buffet lunch on the honor plan, same 
dishes and prices and service as the men's places, but 
this one is for business girls. They said at first that 
we wouldn't make good with them — but we're ready 
to start another within the month. The business girls 
don't cheat — no matter what their uptown sisters may 
try to do." 

As a matter of fact downtown business girls in New 
York eat very sensibly. Sweets are popular but not 
invariable. They prefer candy, with fruit as a second 



NEW YORK 33 

choice, to be eaten some time during the afternoon. In 
big offices, where many girls are employed, " candy 
pools " are often made, each girl contributing five cents 
and getting her pro rata, one member of the staff being 
delegated to make the purchases. Eaten in this way 
the candy acts as a stimulant during the late afternoon 
hours, in much the same way as the invariable tea of 
the business man in London. 

The business girl in New York takes her full hour for 
luncheon. It is seldom a minute more or a minute less. 
She is willing as a rule to stay overtime at night but she 
feels that she must have her sixty minutes in the middle 
of the day. A part of the lunch hour is always a stroll 
— unless there be a downpour. Certain downtown 
streets from twelve to one o'clock each day suggest the 
proximity of a nearby high school or seminary. There 
is much pairing off and quiet flirtation. This noon-day 
promenade of girls — for the most part astonishingly 
well-dressed girls and invariably in twos and threes — is 
one of the sights of downtown New York. Some of the 
girls gather in the old churchyards of Trinity and St. 
Paul's — in lower Broadway — on pleasant days. They 
sit down among the tombstones with their little packages 
of food and eat and chat and then stroll. No one molests 
them and the church authorities, although a little flustered 
when this first began, have seen that there is no harm in it 
and let the girls have their own way. There is always 
great decorousness and these big open-air spaces in the 
midst of the crowded street canyons are enjoyed by the 
women who appreciate the grass and winding paths 
after the hard pavements. 

All the business girls downtown are not content with 
sitting after lunch among the tombstones of St. Paul's 
churchyard or of Trinity. He was indeed a canny 
lunch-man who took note of all the girls strolling in the 
narrow streets of downtown Manhattan, who remem- 



34 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

bered that all New York, rich or poor, loves to dance 
and who then fitted up an unrentable third floor loft 
over his eating place as a dancing hall. Two violins and 
a piano — a gray-bearded sandwich man to patrol the 
streets with " dancing " placarded fore and aft upon 
his boards — the trick was done. Mamie told Sadie and 
Sadie told Elinor and Elinor told Flossie and the lunch- 
man began to grow famous. He made further study of 
the psychology of his patrons. There were the young 
fellows — shipping and file clerks and even ambitious 
young office-boys to be considered. There were the 
after-lunch smokes of these young captains of industry 
to come into the reckoning. The lunch-man placed a 
row of chairs along one edge of his dancing-hall and 
over them " Smoking Permitted at This End of the 
Room." After that Mamie and Sadie and Elinor and 
Flossie had partners and the lunch-man was on the high- 
way to a six-cylinder motor car. He has his imitators. 
If you were in business in lower New York and your 
stenographer began to hum the " Blue Danube " along 
about half an hour before noon you would very well 
know she was gathering steam for the blissful twenty 
minutes of dancing that was going to help her digest 
her lunch. 

You, yourself, are going to lunch in still another sort 
of restaurant. It is characteristic of a type that has 
sprung up on the tip of Manhattan island within the 
past dozen years. You reach this grubbing-place by 
skirting the front doors of unspeakably dirty eating- 
houses in a mean street of the Syrian quarter. Finally 
you turn the corner of a dingy brick building, which was 
once the great house of one of the contemporaries of the 
first of the Vanderbilts and which has managed to escape 
destruction for three quarters of a century and face — 



NEW YORK 35 

the only skyscraper in congested New York which 
stands in a grass-platted yard — the whim of its wealthy 
owner, A fast elevator whisks you thirty stories to the 
top of the building and you step into the lobby of what 
looks, at first glance, to be the entrance hall of some 
fine restaurant in uptown's Fifth avenue. But this 
is a lunching-club — one of the newest in the town as 
well as one of the most elaborate. 

Elaborate did we say? This is the elaboration of per- 
fect taste — unobtrusive rugs, hangings, lighting fix- 
tures and furniture — great, broad rooms and from their 
windows there comes to you another of the spectacular 
views that lay below the man-made peaks of Manhat- 
tan. To the south — the smooth, blue surface of the 
upper bay — in the foreground a nine hundred foot ship 
coming to the new land, her funnels lazily breathing 
smoke at the first lull in her four-day race across the 
Atlantic ; to the east, a mighty river and its bridges, 
Brooklyn again and on very clear days, visions of Long 
island; to the north the most wonderful building con- 
struction that man has ever attempted, Babylonic in 
its immensity ; to the west the brisk waterway of the 
North river and beyond it, Jersey City, sandwiched in 
between the smoky spread of railroad yards. This is 
the sort of thing that Mr. Downtown Luncher may have 
— if he is willing to pay the price. On torrid summer 
days he may ascend to the roof-garden, may glance 
lazily below him at the activities of the busiest city in 
the world and sip up the cool breezes from the sea, while 
folk down in the bottom of the Broadway chasm are 
sweltering from heat and humidity. And in winter he 
will find a complete gymnasium in operation on another 
floor of the club, with a competent instructor in charge. 
The " doctor," as they call him, will lay out a course 
of work. And that course of work, calling for a half- 



36 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

hour of exercise each day just before lunch will make 
dyspeptic and paunchy old money-grubbers alike, keen 
as farmhands coming into dinner. 

And yet this club, typical of so many others in the 
downtown business heart of Manhattan, is but a cog 
in the mighty machine of the lunching of the workaday 
multitudes of downtown. Its doors are closed and lights 
are out at six o'clock in the evening, save on extraordi- 
nary occasions ; while most of its hundred or more well- 
trained waiters go uptown to assist in the dinner and 
the late supper rushes of the fashionable restaurants in 
the theater and hotel district. Like most of its com- 
peers, it is an outgrowth of the wonderfully comfortable 
old Lawyers' Club, which was completely destroyed in 
the great fire that burned the Equitable Building in Jan- 
uary, 1912. From that organization, famed for its noon- 
day hospitality and for the quality of the folk you might 
meet between its walls, have sprung many other down- 
town lunch clubs — the Whitehall, the Hardware, the 
Manufacturers, the Downtown Association, the new 
Lawyers — many, many others ; almost invariably oc- 
cupying the upper floors of some skyscraper that has 
been planned especially for them. These clubs are not 
cheap. It costs from sixty to a hundred dollars to enter 
one of them and about as much more yearly in the form 
of dues. Their restaurant charges are far from low- 
priced. They are never very exclusive organizations 
and yet they give to the strain of the workaday New 
Yorker his last lingering trace of hospitality — the hos- 
pitality that has lingered around Bowling Green and 
Trinity and St. Paul's church-yards since colonial days 
and the coffee houses. 

Even the hospitality of the genial host seems to end 
— with the ending of the lunch-hour. As he takes his 
last sip of cafe noir he is tugging at his watch. 



NEW YORK 37 

" Bless me," he says, " It is going on three o'clock. 
I've got that railroad crowd due in my office in fifteen 
minutes." 

That is your dismissal. For ninety minutes he has 
given you his hospitality — his rare and unselfish self. 
He has put the perplexing details of his business out of 
his mind and given himself to whatever flow of talk 
might suit your fancy. Now the hour and a half of 
grace is over — and you are dismissed, courteously — 
but none the less dismissed. With your host you descend 
to the crowded noisome street. He sees you to the 
subway — gives you a fine warm grasp of his strong 
hand — and plunges back into the great and grinding 
machine of business. 

Lunch in your Day of Days within the City of the Tow- 
ers is over. Three o'clock. Before the last echoes of 
Trinity's bell go ringing down through Wall street to 
halt the busy Exchange — the multitude has been fed. 
Miss Stenographer has had her salad and eclair, two 
waltzes and perhaps a " turkey trot " into the bar- 
gain, and is back at the keys of her typewriter. Mr. 
President has entertained that Certain Party at the 
club and has made him promise to sign that mighty im- 
portant contract. And the certain Party and Mr. Presi- 
dent rode for half an hour on the mechanical horses in 
the gymnasium. What fun, too, for those old boys? 

Three o'clock ! The cashiers are totaling their re- 
ceipts, the waiters and the 'buses are upturning chairs 
and tables to make way for the scrub-women, some are 
already beginning to don their overcoats to go uptown; 
but the three-quarters of a million of hungry mouths 
have been fed. New York has caught its breath in 
mid-day relaxation and once more is hard at work — • 
putting in the last of its hours of the business day with 
renewed and feverish energy. 



38 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 



IV 

You had planned at first to walk up Broadway. 
You wanted to see once again the church-yards around 
Trinity and St. Paul's, perhaps make a side excur- 
sion down toward Fraunces' Tavern — just now come 
back into its own again. Some of the old landmarks 
that are still hidden around downtown New York seemed 
to appeal to you. But your host at luncheon laughed 
at you. 

" If you want to spend your time that way, all right," 
he said, " but the only really old things you will find 
in New York are the faces of the young men. You can 
find those anywhere in the town." 

And there was another reckoning to be figured. 
Three o'clock means the day well advanced and there is 
a ris-a-zns awaiting you uptown. Of course, there is 
a Her to enjoy your Day of Days with you. And just 
for convenience alone we will call her Katherine. It 
is a pretty name for a woman, and it will do here and 
now quite as well as any other. 

Katherine is waiting for you in the Fourteenth street 
station of the subway. She is prompt — after the 
fashion of most New York girls. And it is a relief to 
come out of the overcrowded tube and find her there at 
the entrance that leads up to sunshine and fresh air. 
She knows her New York thoroughly and as a prelude 
to the trip uptown she leads you over to Fifth avenue — 
to the upper deck of one of those big green peregrinating 
omnibuses. 

" It's a shame that we could not have started at Wash- 
ington square," she apologizes. " When you sweep 
around and north through the great arch it almost seems 
as if you were passing through the portals of New York. 
It is one of the few parts of the town that are not chang- 
ing rapidly," 



NEW YORK 39 

For Fifth avenue — only a few blocks north of that 
stately arch — has begun to distintegrate and decay. 
Not in the ordinary sense of those terms. But to 
those who remember the stately street of fifteen or 
twenty years ago — lined with the simple and dig- 
nified homes of the town — its change into a business 
thoroughfare brings keen regrets. Katherine remem- 
bers that she read in a book that there are today 
more factory workers employed in Fifth avenue or 
close to it, than in such great mill cities as Lowell 
or Lawrence or Fall River, and when you ask her the 
reason why she will tell you how these great buildings 
went soaring up as office-buildings, without office ten- 
ants to fill them. They represent speculation, and spec- 
ulation is New Yorkish. But speculation in wholesale 
cannot afford to lose, and that is why the garment manu- 
facturers and many others of their sort came flocking 
to the great retail shopping district between Fourth and 
Seventh avenues and Fourteenth and Thirty-fourth 
streets, and sent the shops soaring further to the north. 
It has been expensive business throughout, doubly ex- 
pensive, because absolutely unnecessary. Some of the 
great retail houses of New York built modern and elab- 
orate structures south of Thirty-fourth street within 
the past twenty years in the firm belief that the retail 
shopping section had been fixed for the next half cen- 
tury. But the new stores had hardly been opened be- 
fore the deluge of manufacturing came upon them. 
Shoppers simply would not mix with factory hands upon 
lower Fifth avenue and the side streets leading from it. 
And so the shop-keepers have had to move north and 
build anew. And just what a tax such moving has been 
upon the consumer no one has ever had the audacity 
to estimate. 

" They should have known that nothing ever stays 
fixed in New York," says Katherine. " We are a rest- 



40 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

less folk, who make a restless city. Stay fixed? Did 
you notice the station at which you entered today ? " 

Of course you did. The new Grand Central, with its 
marvelous blue ceiling capping a waiting-room so large 
that the New York City Hall, cupola, wings and all 
could be set within it, can hardly escape the attention 
of any traveler who passes within its portals. 

" It is the greatest railroad station in the world," she 
continues, " and yet I have read in the newspapers that 
Commodore Vanderbilt built on that very plat of ground 
in 1 87 1 the largest station in the world for the accom- 
modation of his railroads. He thought that it would 
last for all time. In forty years the wreckers were pull- 
ing it down. It was outgrown, utterly outgrown and 
they were carting it off piece by piece to the rubbish 
heaps." 

She turns suddenly upon you. 

" That is typical of our restless, lovely city," she tells 
you. And you, yourself, have heard that only two 
years ago they tore down a nineteen story building at 
Wall and Nassau streets so that they might replace it 
by another of the towers — this one thirty stories in 
height. 

The conductor of the green omnibus thrusts his green 
fare-box under your nose. You find two dimes and drop 
it into the contrivance. 

" You can get more value for less money and less 
value for much money in New York than in any other 
large city in the world," says Katherine. 

She is right — and you know that she is right. You 
can have a glorious ride up the street, that even in its 
days of social decadence is still the finest highway in 
the land — a ride that continues across the town and up 
its parked rim for long miles — for a mere ten cents of 
Uncle Sam's currency and as for the reverse — well you 



NEW YORK 41 

are going to dinner in a smart hotel with Katherine in 
a little while. 

You swing across Broadway and up the west edge of 
Madison square, catch a single, wondering close-at-hand 
glimpse of the white campanile of the Metropolitan tower 
which dominates that open place and so all but re- 
places Diana on her perch above Madison Square Gar- 
den — a landmark of the New York of a quarter of a 
century ago and which is apt to come into the hands 
of the wreckers almost any day now. Now you are at 
the south edge of the new shopping district, although 
some of the ultra places below Thirty-fourth street have 
begun to move into that portion of the avenue just south 
of Central Park. In a little while they may be stealing 
up the loveliest portion of the avenue — from Fifty- 
ninth street north. 

The great shops dominate the avenue. And if you 
look with sharp eyes as the green bus bears you up this 
via sacre, you may see that one of the greatest ones — 
a huge department store encased in architecturally su- 
perb white marble — bears no sign or token of its owner- 
ship or trade. An oversight, you think. Not a bit of 
it. Four blocks farther up the avenue is another great 
store in white marble — a jewelry shop of international 
reputation. You will have to scan its broad fagade 
closely indeed before you find the name of the firm in 
tiny letters upon the face of its clock. Oversight? Not 
a bit of it. It is the ultra of shop-keeping in New York 
— the assumption that the shop is so well known that 
it need not be placarded to the vulgar world. And if 
strangers from other points fail to identify it — well 
that is because of their lack of knowledge and the shop- 
keeper may secretly rejoice. 

But, after all, it is the little shops that mark the char- 
acter of Fifth avenue — not its great emporiums. It is 
the little millinery shops where an engaging creature in 



42 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

black and white simpers toward you and calls you, if 
you are of the eternal feminine, " my dear; " the jewelry 
shops where the lapidary rises from his lathe and 
offers a bit of craftsmanship ; the rare galleries that 
run from old masters to modern etchers ; specialty shops, 
filled top to bottom with toys or Persian rugs, or 
women's sweaters, or foreign magazines and books, that 
render to Fifth avenue its tremendous cosmopolitanism. 
These little shops make for personality. There is some- 
thing in the personal contact between the proprietor and 
the customer that makes mere barter possess a real fas- 
cination. And if you do pay two or three times the real 
value in the little shop you have just so much more fun 
out of the shopping. And there are times when real 
treasures may come out of their stores. 

" Look at the cornices," interrupts Katherine. " Mr. 
Arnold Bennett says that they are the most wonderful 
things in all New York." 

Katherine may strain her neck, looking at cornices 
if she so wills. As for you, the folk who promenade 
the broad sidewalks are more worth your while. There 
are more of them upon the west walk than upon the east 
— for some strange reason that has long since brought 
about a similar phenomenon upon Broadway and sent 
west side rents high above those upon the east. Fifth 
avenue thrusts its cosmopolitanism upon you, not alone 
in her shops, with their wonderfully varied offerings, 
but in the very humans who tread her pavements. The 
New York girl may not always be beautiful but she is 
rarely anything but impeccable. And if in the one in- 
stance she is extreme in her styles, in the next she is 
apt to be severe in her simplicity of dress. And it is 
difficult to tell to which ordinary preference should go. 
These girls — girls in a broad sense all the way from trim 
children in charge of maid or governess to girls whose 
pinkness of skin defies the graying of their locks — a 



NEW YORK 43 

sprinkling of men, not always so faultless in dress or 
manner as their sisters — and you have the Fifth avenue 
crowd. Then between these two quick moving files of 
pedestrians — set at all times in the rapid tempo of New 
York — a quadruple file of carriages ; the greater part 
of them motor driven. 

Traffic in Fifth avenue, like traffic almost everywhere 
else in New York is a problem increasing in perplexity. 
A little while ago the situation was met and for a time 
improved by slicing ofif the fronts of the buildings — 
perhaps the most expensive shave that the town has ever 
known — and setting back the sidewalks six or eight 
feet. But the benefits then gained have already been 
over-reached and the traffic policeman at the street 
corners all the way up the avenue must possess rare wit 
and diplomacy — while their fellows at such corners as 
Thirty-fourth and Forty-second are hardly less than field 
generals. And with all the finesse of their work the 
traffic moves like molasses. Long double and triple files 
of touring cars and limousines, the combined cost of 
which would render statistics such as would gladden 
the heart of a Sunday editor, make their way up and 
down the great street tediously. If a man is in a hurry 
he has no business even to essay the Avenue. And oc- 
casionally the whole tangle is double-tangled. The 
shriek of a fire-engine up a side street or the clang of an 
ambulance demanding a clear right-of-way makes the 
traffic question no easier. Yet the policemen at the street 
corners are not caught unawares. With the shrill com- 
mands of their own whistles they maneuver trucks and 
automobiles and even some old-fashioned hansom cabs, 
pedestrians, all the rest — as coolly and as evenly as if 
it had been rehearsed for whole weeks. 

New York is wonderful, the traffic of its chief show 
street — for Fifth avenue can now be fairly said to 



44 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

have usurped Broadway as the main highway of the 
upper city — tremendous. You begin to compute what 
must be the rental vahies upon this proud section of Fifth 
avenue, as it cHmbs Murray Hill from Thirty-fourth 
street to Forty-second street, when Katherine interrupts 
you once again. She knows her New York thoroughly 
indeed. 

"Do you notice that house?" she demands. 

You follow her glance to a very simple brick house, 
upon the corner of an inconsequential side street. Beside 
it on Fifth avenue is an open lot — of perhaps fifty feet 
frontage, giving to the avenue but a plain brown wooden 
fence. 

" A corking building lot," you venture, " Why don't 
they — " 

" I expected you to say that," she laughs. " They have 
wanted to build upon that lot — time and time again. 
But when they approach the owner he laughs at them 
and declines to consider any ofifer. ' My daughter has 
a little dog,' he says politely, ' It must have a place for 
exercise.' We New Yorkers are an odd lot," she laughs. 
" You know that the Goelets kept a cow in the lawn of 
their big house at Broadway and Nineteenth street until 
almost twenty years ago — until there was not a square 
foot of grass outside of a park within five miles. And 
in New York the man who can do the odd thing suc- 
cessfully is apt to be applauded. You could not imagine 
such a thing in Boston or Baltimore or Philadelphia, 
could you? " 

You admit that your imagination would fall short of 
such heights and ask Katherine if you are going up to 
the far end of the 'bus run — to that great group of 
buildings — university, cathedral, hospital, divinity 
school — that have been gathered just beyond the north- 
western corner of Central Park. 

" No, I think not," she quickly decides, " You know 



NEW YORK 45 

that Columbia is not to New York as Havard is to 
Boston. Harvard dominates Boston, Columbia is but 
a peg in the educational system of New York. The 
best families here do not bow to its fetich. They are 
quite as apt to send their boys to Yale or Princeton — 
even Harvard." 

" Then there's the cathedral and the Drive," you ven- 
ture. 

" We have a cathedral right here on Fifth avenue that 
is finished and, in its way, quite as beautiful. And as 
for the Drive — it is merely a rim of top-heavy and 
expensive apartment houses. The West Side is no 
longer extremely smart. The truth of the matter is 
that we must pause for afternoon tea." 

You ignore that horrifying truth for an instant. 

" What has happened to the poor West Side? " you de- 
mand. 

Katherine all but lowers her voice to a whisper. 

" Twenty years ago and it had every promise of suc- 
cess. It looked as if Riverside Drive would surpass the 
Avenue as a street of fine residences. The side streets 
were preeminently nice. Then came the subway — and 
with it the apartment houses. After that the very nice 
folk began moving to the side streets in the upper Fifties, 
the Sixties and the Seventies between Park and Fifth ave- 
nues." 

" Suppose that the apartment houses should begin to 
drift in there — in any numbers?" you demand. 

" Lord knows," says Katherine, and with due rever- 
ence adds : " There is the last stand of the prosperous 
New Yorker with an old-fashioned notion that he and 
his would like to live in a detached house. The Park 
binds him in on the West, the tenement district and Lex- 
ington avenue on the East — to the North Harlem and 
the equally impossible Bronx. The old guard is stand- 
ing together." 



46 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

"There is Brooklyn?" you venture. 

" No New Yorker," says Katherine, with withering 
scorn, ** ever goes publicly to Brooklyn unless he is 
being buried in Greenwood cemetery." 

Tea for you is being served in a large mausoleum of 
a white hotel — excessively white from a profuse use of 
porcelain tiles which can be washed occasionally — of 
most extraordinary architecture. Some day some one 
is going to attempt an analysis of hotel architecture in 
New York and elsewhere in the U. S. A. but this is not 
the time and place. Suffice it to say here and now that 
you finally found a door entering the white porcelain 
mausoleum. What a feast awaited your eyes — as well 
as your stomach — within. Rooms of rose pink and 
rooms of silver gray, Persian rooms, Japanese rooms, 
French rooms in the several varieties of Louis, Greek 
rooms — Europe, the ancients and the Orient, have been 
ransacked for the furnishing of this tavern. And in 
the center of them all is a great glass-enclosed garden, 
filled with giant palms and tiny tables, tremendous 
waiters and infinitesimal chairs. A large bland-faced 
employe — who is a sort of sublimated edition of the 
narrow lean hat-boys who we shall find in the eating 
places of the Broadway theater districts — divests you 
of your outer wraps. You elbow past a band and ar- 
rive at the winter garden. A head waiter in an instant 
glance of steel-blue eyes decides that you are fit and 
finds the tiniest of the tiny tables for you. It is so far 
in the shade of the sheltering palm that you have to 
bend almost double to drink your tea — and the orches- 
tra is rather uncomfortably near. 

Katherine might have taken you to other tea dispen- 
saries — an unusual place in a converted stable in 
Thirty-fourth street, another stable loft in West Twenty- 
eighth — dozens of little shops, generally feminine to an 



V- 




>- 



D 
O" 

en 



NEW YORK 47 

intensified degree, which combine the serving of tea 
with the vending of their wares. But she preferred the 
big white hotel. 

" Tea at the Plaza is so satisfactory and so rest- 
ful," she says, as you dodge to permit two ladies 
— one in gray silk and the other in a cut of blue 
cloth that gives her the contour of a magnified frog — 
to slip past you without knocking your tea out of your 
untrained fingers. " We might have gone to the Man- 
hattan — but it's so filled with young girls and the chap- 
pies from the schools — the Ritz is proper but dull, so 
is Sherry's — all the rest more or less impossible." 

She rattles on — the matter of restaurants is al- 
ways dear to the New York heart. You ignore the de- 
tails. 

" But why? " you demand. 

" Why what? " she returns. 

"Why tea?" 

You explain that afternoon tea in its real lair — Lon- 
don — in a sort of climatic necessity. The prevalence of 
fog, of raw damp days, makes a cup of hot tea a real 
bracer — a stimulant that carries the human through 
another two or three hours of hard existence until the 
late London dinner. The bracing atmosphere of New 
York — with more clear days than any other metropoli- 
tan city in the world — does not need tea. You say so 
frankly. 

" I suppose you are right," Katherine concedes, " but 
we have ceased in this big city to rail at the English. 
We bow the knee to them. The most fashionable of our 
newest hotels and shops run — absurdly many times — 
to English ways. And afternoon tea has long since 
ceased to be a noVelty in our lives. Why, they are be- 
ginning to serve it at the offices downtown — just as 
they do in dear old London." 

You swallow hard — some one has recommended that 



48 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

to you as a method of suppressing emotion — for polite 
society is never emotional. 



Dinner is New York's real function of the day. And 
dinner in New York means five million hungry stomachs 
demanding to be filled. The New York dinner is as 
cosmopolitan as the folk who dwell on the narrow is- 
land of Manhattan and the two other islands that press 
closely to it. The restaurant and hotel dinners are as 
cosmopolitan as the others. Of course, for the sake of 
brevity, if for no other reason, you must eliminate the 
home dinners — and read " home " as quickly into the cold 
and heavy great houses of the avenue as into the little 
clusters of rooms in crowded East Side tenements where 
poverty is never far away and next week's meals a real 
problem. And remember, that to dine even in a reason- 
ably complete list of New York's famous eating places 
— a new one every night — would take you more than 
a year. At the best your vision of them must be desul- 
tory. 

Six o'clock sees the New York business army well on 
its way toward home — the seething crowds at the 
Brooklyn bridge terminal in Park Row, the overloaded 
subway straining to move its fearful burden, the ferry 
and the railroad terminals focal points of great attract- 
iveness. To make a single instance: take that division 
of the army that dwells in Brooklyn. It begins its march 
dinnerward a little after four o'clock, becomes a push- 
ing, jostling mob a little later and shows no sign of 
abatement until long after six. Within that time the 
railroad folk at the Park Row terminal of the old bridge 
have received, classified and despatched Brooklynward. 
more than one hundred and fifty thousand persons — 
the population of a city almost the size of Syracuse. 



NEW YORK 49 

And the famous old bridge is but one of four direct 
paths from Manhattan to Brooklyn. 

Six o'clock sees restaurants and cafes alight and ready 
for the two or three hours of their really brisk traffic of 
the day. There are even dinner restaurants downtown, 
remarkably good places withal and making especial ap- 
peal to those overworked souls who are forced to stay 
at the office at night. There are bright lights in China- 
town where innumerable " Tuxedos " and " Port Ar- 
thurs " are beginning to prepare the chop-suey in im- 
maculate Mongolian kitchens. But the real restaurant 
district for the diner-out hardly begins south of Madison 
square. There are still a very few old hotels in Broad- 
way south of that point — a lessening company each 
year — one or two in close proximity to Washington 
square. Two of these last make a specialty of French 
cooking — their table d'hotes are really famous — and 
perhaps you rhay fairly say when you are done at them 
that you have eaten at the best restaurants in all New 
York. From them Fifth avenue runs a straight course 
to the newer hotels far to the north — a silent brilliantly 
lighted street as night comes " with the double row 
of steel-blue electric lamps resembling torch-bearing 
monks " one brilliant New York writer has put it. But 
before the newest of the new an intermediate era of 
hotels, the Holland, the nearby Imperial and the Wal- 
dorf-Astoria chief among these. The Waldorf has been 
from the day it first opened its doors — more than 
twenty years ago — New York's really representative 
hotel. Newer hostelries have tried to wrest that honor 
from it — but in vain. It has clung jealously to its rep- 
utation. The great dinners of the town are held in its 
wonderful banqueting halls, the well-known men of New 
York are constantly in its corridors. It is club and more 
than club — it is a clearing-house for all of the best 



50 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

clubs. It is the focal center for the hotel life of the 
town. 

There is an important group of hotels in the rather 
spectacular neighborhood of Times square — the Astor, 
with its distinctly German flavor, and the Knickerbocker 
which whimsically likes to call itself " the country club 
on Forty-second street " distinctive among them. And 
ranging upon upper Fifth avenue, or close to it, are other 
important houses, the Belmont, the aristocratic Man- 
hattan, the ultra-British Ritz-Carlton, the St. Regis, the 
Savoy, the Netherland, the Plaza, and the Gotham. In 
between these are those two impeccable restaurants — 
so distinctive of New York and so long wrapped up in 
its history — Sherry's and Delmonico's. 

Over in the theatrical brilliancy of Broadway up and 
down from Times square are other restaurants — Shan- 
ley's, Churchill's, Murray's — the list is constantly chang- 
ing. A fashionable restaurant in New York is either 
tremendously successful — or else, as we shall later see, 
they are telephoning for the sheriff. And the last out- 
come is apt more to follow than the first. For it is a 
tremendous undertaking to launch a restaurant in these 
days. The decorations of the great dining-rooms must 
rival those of a Versailles palace while the so-called minor 
appointments — silver, linen, china and the rest must be 
as faultless as in any great house upon Fifth avenue. 
The first cost is staggering, the upkeep a steady drain. 
There is but one opportunity for the proprietor — and 
that opportunity is in his charges. And when you come 
to dine in one of these showy uptown places you will 
find that he has not missed his opportunity. 

All New York that dines out does not make for these 
great places or their fellows. There are little restau- 
rants that cast a glamour over their poor food by thrust- 
ing out hints of a magic folk named Bohemians who dine 
night after night at their dirty tables. There are others 



NEW YORK 51 

who with a Persian name seek to allure the ill-informed, 
some stout German places giving the substantial cheer 
of the Fatherland, beyond them restaurants phrasing 
themselves in the national dishes and the cooking of 
every land in the world, save our own. For a real 
American restaurant is hard to find in New York — 
real American dishes treats of increasing rarity. A 
great hotel recently banished steaks from its bills-of-fare, 
another has placed the ban on pie ; and as for strawberry 
short-cake — just ask for strawberry short-cake. The 
concoction that the waiter will set before you will leave 
you hesitating between tears and laughter — ridicule for 
the pitiful attempts of a French cook and tears for your 
thoughts of the tragedy that has overwhelmed an Amer- 
ican institution. Some day some one is going to build 
a hotel with the American idea standing back of it right 
in the heart of New York. He is going to have the 
bravery or the patriotism to call it the American House 
or the United States Hotel or Congress Hall or some 
other title that means something quite removed from the 
aristocratic nomenclature that our modern generation 
of tavern-keepers have borrowed from Europe without 
the slightest sense of fitness ; and to that man shall 
be given more than mere riches — the satisfaction that 
will come to him from having accomplished a real 
work. 

The truth of the matter is that we have borrowed more 
than nomenclature from Europe. We have taken the 
so-called " European plan " with all of its disadvantages 
and none of its advantages. We have done away with 
the stuffy over-eating " American plan " and have made 
a rule of " pay-as-you-go " that is quite all right — and 
is not. For to the simple " European plan " has recently 
been added many complications. In other days the gen- 
erosity of the portions in a New York hotel was famous. 
A single portion of any important dish was ample for 



52 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

two. Your smiling old-fashioned waiter told you that. 
The waiter in a New York restaurant today does not 
smile. He merely tells you that the food is served " per 
portion " which generally means that an unnecessary 
amount of food is prepared in the kitchen and sent from 
the table, uneaten, as waste. And a smart New York 
restanranteur recently made a " cover charge " of 
twenty-five cents for bread and butter and ice-water. 
Others followed. It will not be long before a smarter 
restauranteur will make the " cover charge " fifty cents, 
and then folk will begin streaming into his place. They 
don't complain. That's not the New York way. 

They do not even complain of the hat-boys — blood- 
thirsty little brigands who snatch your hat and other 
wraps before you enter a restaurant. The brigands are 
skillfully chosen — lean, hungry little boys every time, 
never fat, sleek, well-fed looking little boys. They are 
employed by a trust, which rents the " hat-checking 
privilege " from the proprietor of the hotel or restaur- 
ant. The owner of the trust pays well for these privi- 
leges and the little boys must work hard to bring him 
back his rental fees and a fair profit beside. 

Leave that to them. Emerge from a restaurant, well- 
fed and at peace with the world and deny that lean-look- 
ing, swarthy-faced, black-eyed boy a quarter if you can — 
or dare. A dime is out of the question. He might in- 
sult you, probably would. But a quarter buys your self- 
respect and the head of the trust a share in his new mo- 
tor car. The lean-looking boy buys no motor cars. He 
works on a salary and there are no pockets in his uni- 
form. There is a stern-visaged cicerone in the back- 
ground and to the cicerone roll all the quarters, but the 
New Yorker does not complain — save when he reaches 
Los Angeles or Atlanta or some other fairly distant 
place and finds the same sort of highway brigandage 
in effect there. 



NEW YORK 53 

VI 

After the dinner and the hat-boy — the theater. You 
suggest the theater to Katherine. She is enthusiastic. 
You pick the theater. It is close at hand and you 
quickly find your way to it. A gentleman, whose polite- 
ness is of a variety, somewhat frappe, awaits you in the 
box-office. A line of hopeful mortals is shuffling toward 
him, to disperse with hope left behind. But this antici- 
pates. 

You inquire of the man in the box-office for two seats 
— two particularly good seats. You remember going to 
the theater in Indianapolis once upon a time, a stranger, 
and having been seated behind the fattest theater pillar 
that you could have ever possibly imagined. But you 
need not worry about the pillars in this New York play- 
house. The box-office gentleman, whose thoughts seem 
to be a thousand miles away, blandly replies that the 
house is sold out. 

"So good?" you brashly venture. You had not 
fancied this production so successful. He does not even 
assume to hear your comment. You decide that you will 
see this particular play at a later time. You suggest as 
much to the indifferent creature behind the wicket. He 
replies by telling you that he can only give you tickets 
for a Monday or Tuesday three weeks hence — and then 
nothing ahead of the seventeenth row. Can he not do 
better than that? He cannot. He is positive that he 
cannot. And his positiveness is Gibraltarian in its im- 
mobility. A faint sign of irritation covers his bland 
face. He wants you to see that you are taking too much 
of his time. 

Katherine saves the situation. She whispers to you 
that she noticed a little shop nearby with a sign " Tickets 
for all Theaters " displayed upon it. 

" You know they abolished the speculators two years 
ago," she explains. 



54 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

You move on to the little shop with the inviting sign. 
The gentleman behind its counters has manners at least. 
He greets you with the smile of the professional shop- 
keeper. 

" Have you tickets for ' The Giddiest Girl ' ? " you in- 
quire. 

He smiles ingratiatingly. Of course he has, for any 
night and anywhere you wish them. 

" What is the price of them ? " 

You are not coldly commercial but, despite that smile, 
merely apprehensive. And you are beginning to under- 
stand New York. 

" Four dollars." 

Not so bad at that — just the box-office price. You 
bring out four greasy one-dollar bills. His eyes fixed 
upon them, he places a ticket down upon the counter. 

" There — there are two of us," you stammer. 

He does not stammer. 

"Do you think that they are four dollars a dozen?" 
he sallies. 

You give him a ten dollar bill this time. You do not 
kick. Even though the show is perfectly rotten and the 
usherette charges you ten cents for a poorly printed pro- 
gram and scowls because you take the change from her 
itching palm, do not complain. You would not com- 
plain even if you knew that the man in the chair next 
to you paid only the regular prices, because he happened 
to belong to the same lodge as the cousin of the treas- 
urer of the theater, while the man in the chair next to 
Katherine paid nothing at all for his seat — having a 
relative who advertises in the theater programs. You 
do not kick. Complaint has long since been eliminated 
from the New York code and you have begun to realize 
that. 

After the theater, another restaurant — this time for 



NEW YORK 55 

supper — more hat-boys, more brigandage but it is the 
thing to do and you must do it. And you must do it 
well. Splendor costs and you pay — your full propor- 
tion. If up in your home town you know a nice little 
place where you can drop in after the show at the local 
playhouse and have a glass of beer and a rarebit — dis- 
miss that as a prevailing idea in the neighborhood of 
Long Acre square. The White Light district of Broad- 
way can buy no motor cars on the beer and rarebit trade. 
Louey's trade in his modest little place up home is suf- 
ficient to keep him in moderate living year in and year 
out, but Louey does not have to pay Broadway ground 
rent, or Broadway prices for food-stuffs or Broadway 
salaries — to say nothing of having a thirst for a 
bigger and faster automobile than his neighbor. And 
as we have said, the opportunity for bankruptcy in the 
so-called " lobster palaces " of Broadway runs high. As 
this is being written, one of the most famous of them has 
collapsed. 

Its proprietor — he was a smart caterer come east 
from Chicago where he had made his place fashionable 
and himself fairly rich — for a dozen years ran a pros- 
perous restaurant within a stone-throw of the tall white 
shaft of the Times building. And even if the heels were 
the highest, the gowns the lowest, the food was impec- 
cable and if you knew New York at all you knew who 
went there. It was gay and beautiful and high-priced. 
It was immensely popular. Then the proprietor listened 
to sirens. They commanded him to tear down the simple 
structure of his restaurant and there build a towering 
hotel. He obeyed orders. With the magic of New 
York builders the new building was ready within the 
twelvemonth. It represented all that might be desired 
— or that upper Broadway at least might desire — in 
modern hotel construction. 

But it could not succeed. A salacious play which 



56 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

made a considerable commercial success took its title 
from the new hotel and called itself " The Girl from 

R 's." That was the last straw. It might have been 

good fun for the man from Baraboo or the man from 
Jefferson City to come to New York and dine quietly 

and elegantly at R 's, but to stop at R 's hotel, 

to have his mail sent there, to have the local paper report 
that he was registered at that really splendid hostelry 
— ah, that was a different matter, indeed. Your Bara- 
boo citizen had some fairly conservative connections — 
church and business — and he took no risks. The new 
hotel went bankrupt.* 

Beer and rarebits, indeed. Sam Blythe tells of the 
little group of four who went into a hotel grillroom not 
far from Forty-second street and Broadway, who mildly 
asked for beer and rabbits. 

" We have fine partridges," said the head-waiter, in- 
sinuatingly. 

" We asked for beer and rabbits," insisted the host of 
the little group. He really did not know his New York. 

" We have fine partridges," reiterated the head-waiter, 
then yawned slightly behind his hand. That yawn set- 
tled it. The head of the party was bellicose. He lost 
his temper completely. In a few minutes an ambulance 
and a patrol wagon came racing up Broadway. But the 
hotel had won. It always does. 

One thing more — the cabaret. We think that if you 

are really fond of Katherine, and Katherine's reputation, 

you will avoid the restaurants that make a specialty of 

the so-called cabarets. Really good restaurants manage 

to get along without them. And the very best that can 

be said of them is that they are invariably indifferently 

poor — a melange contributed by broken-down actors or 

* Another hotel man has just taken the property. His first step 
has been to change its name and, if possible, its reputation. 

E. H. 



NEW YORK 57 

actresses, or boys or girls stolen from the possibilities 
of a really decent way of earning a living. As for the 
worst, it is enough to say that the familiarity that be- 
gins by breeding contempt follows in the wake of the 
cabaret. It may be very jolly for you, of a lonely sum- 
mer evening in New York and forgetting all the real 
pleasures of a lonely summer night in the big town — ■ 
wonderful orchestral concerts in Central Park, dining on 
open-air terraces and cool quiet roofs, motoring off to 
wonderful shore dinners in queer old taverns — to hunt 
out these great gay places in the heart of the town. 
Easy camaraderie is part and parcel of them. But you 
will not want such comrades to meet any of the Kath- 
erines of your family. And therein lies a more than sub- 
tle distinction. 

VII 

It has all quite dazed you. You turn toward Katherine 
as you ride home with her in the taxicab — space for- 
bids a description of the horrors and the indignities of 
the taxicab trust. 

" Is it like this — every night? " you feebly ask. 

" Every night of the year," she replies. " And typi- 
cal New Yorkers like it." 

That puts a brand-new thought into your mind. 

" What is a typical New Yorker ? " you demand. 

" We are all typical New Yorkers," she laughs. 

It is a foolish answer — of course. But the strange 
part of the whole thing is that Katherine is right. Either 
there are no typical New Yorkers — as many sane folk 
solemnly aver — or else every one who tarries in the city 
through the passing of even a single night is a typical 
New Yorker. How can it be else in a city who is still 
growing like a girl in her teens, who adds to herself each 
year in permanent population 135,000 human beings, 
whose transient population is nightly estimated at over 
a hundred thousand? They ^re all typical New Yorkers. 



58 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

Here is Solomon Strunsky who has just arrived 
through Ellis Island, scared and forlorn, with his scared 
and forlorn little family trailing on behind, Solomon 
Strunsky all but penniless, and the merciless home-sick- 
ness for the little faraway town in Polish hills tearing at his 
heart. Is Solomon Strunsky less a typical New Yorker 
than the scion of this fine old family which for sixty 
years lived and died in a red-brick mansion close by 
Washington square? For in four years Solomon Strun- 
sky will be keeping his own little store in the East 
Side, in another year he will be moving his brood up to 
a fine new house in Harlem, an even dozen years from 
the entrance at Ellis Island and you may be reading the 
proud patronymic of Strunsky spelled along a signboard 
upon one of the great new commercial barracks, which, 
not content with remaining downtown, began the de- 
spoliation of Fifth avenue and its adjacent retail district. 
Can you keep Solomon Strunsky out of the family of 
typical New Yorkers? We think not. 

We think that you cannot exclude the man who through 
some stroke of fortune has accumulated money in a 
smaller city, and who has come to New York to live 
and to spend it. There are many thousands of him 
dwelling upon the island of Manhattan ; with his fam- 
ilies they make a considerable community by itself. 
They are good spenders, good New Yorkers in that they 
never complain while the strings of their purses are 
never tightly tied. They live in smart apartments up- 
town, at tremendously high rentals, keep at least one 
car in service at all seasons of the year, dine luxuriously 
in luxurious eating-places, attend the opera once a week 
or a fortnight, see the new plays, keep abreast of the 
showy side of New York. They are typical New 
Yorkers. In an apartment a little further down the 
street — which rents at half the figure and comes danger- 
ously near being called a flat — is another family. This 



/ 



/ 



NEW YORK 59 

family also attends the new plays, although it is far more 
apt to go a floor or even two aloft, than to meet the specu- 
lator's prices for orchestra seats. It also goes to the 
opera, and the young woman of the house is in deadly 
earnest when she says that she does not mind standing 
through the four or five long acts of a Wagnerian mati- 
nee, because the nice young ushers let you sit on the floor 
in the intermissions. But this family goes farther than 
the drama — spoken or sung. It is conversant with the 
new books and the new pictures. That same young 
woman swings the Phi Beta Kappa key of the most dif- 
ficult institution of learning on this continent. And she 
knows more about the trend of modern art than half of 
the artists themselves. And yet she " goes to business " 
— is the capable secretary of a very capable man down- 
town. 

These are typical New Yorkers. So are a family over 
in the next block — theirs is frankly a flat in every sense 
of that despised word. They have not been in the 
theater in a dozen years, never in one of the big modern 
restaurants or hotels. Yet the head of that family is a 
man whose name is known and spoken reverently through 
little homes all the way across America. He is a 
worker in the church, although not a clergyman, a mili- 
tant friend of education, although not an educator, and 
he believes that New York is the most thoughtful and 
benevolent city in the world. And if you attempt to 
argue with him, he will prove easily and smilingly, that 
he is right and you — are just mistaken. He and his 
know their New York — a New York of high Christian 
force and precept — and they, too, are New Yorkers. 

So, too, is Blifi^kins and the little Bliffkins — although 
Bliffkins holds property in a bustling Ohio city and votes 
within its precincts. To tell the truth baldly, the Bliflf- 
kinses descend upon New York once each year and 
never remain more than a fortnight. But they stop at 



6o PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

a great hotel and they are great spenders. Floor- 
walkers, head-waiters, head-ushers know them. An- 
nually, and for a few golden days they are part of New 
York — typical New Yorkers, if you please. And when 
they are gone other Bliffkinses, from almost every town 
across the land, big and little, come to replace them. 
And all these are typical New Yorkers. 

What is the typical New Yorker? 

Are the sane folk right when they say that he does not 
exist? We do not think so. We think that Katherine 
in all her flippancy was right. They are all typical New 
Yorkers who sojourn, no matter for how little a time, 
within her boundaries. We will go farther still. You 
might almost say that all Americans are typical New 
Yorkers. For New York is, in no small sense, America. 
Other towns and cities may publicly scoff her, down in 
their hearts they slavishly imitate her, her store fronts, 
her fashions, her hotel and her theater customs, her 
policemen, even her white-winged street cleaners. They 
publicly laugh at her — down in their hearts they se- 
cretly adore her. 



3 

ACROSS THE EAST RIVER 

PHYSICALLY only the East river separates Brook- 
lyn from Manhattan island. The island of Man- 
hattan was and still is to many folk the city of New 
York. Across that narrow wale of the East river — one 
of the busiest water-highways in all the world — men 
have thrust several great bridges and tunnels. Politi- 
cally Brooklyn and Manhattan are one. They are the 
most important boroughs of that which has for the past 
fifteen years been known as Greater New York. 

But in almost every other way Manhattan and Brook- 
lyn are nearly a thousand miles apart. In social customs, 
m many of the details of living they are vastly different, 
and this despite the fact that the greater part of the male 
population of Brooklyn daily travels to Manhattan is- 
land to work in its offices and shops and you can all but 
toss a stone from one community into the other. The 
very fact that Brooklyn is a dwelling place for New 
York — professional funny-men long ago called it a 
" bed-chamber " — has done much, as we shall see, to- 
ward building up the peculiar characteristics of the 
town that stands just across the East river from the tip 
of the busiest little island in the world. 

Consider for an instant the situation of Brooklyn. 
It fills almost the entire west end of Long island — a 
slightly rolling tract of land between a narrow and un- 
speakably filthy stream on the north known as Newtown 
creek and the great cool ocean on the south. This en- 
tire tract has for many years been known as Kings 

6i 



62 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

county — its name a slight proof of its antiquity. Many 
years ago there were various villages in the old county 
— among them Greenpoint, Bushwick, Williamsburgh, 
Canarsie, Flatbush, Gravesend and Brooklyn. They 
were Dutch towns, and you can still see some evidences 
of this in their old houses, although these are disappear- 
ing quite rapidly nowadays. Brooklyn grew the most 
rapidly — from almost the very day of the establishment 
of the republic. Robert Fulton developed his steam- 
ferry and the East river ceased to be the bugaboo it had 
always been to sailing vessels. Fulton ferry was popu- 
lar from the first. With the use of steam its importance 
waxed and soon it was overcrowded. Another ferry 
came, another and another — many, many others. They 
were all crowded, for Brooklyn was growing, a close 
rim of houses and churches and shops all the way along 
the bank of the East river from the Navy Yard at the 
sharp crook of the river that the Dutch called the Wall- 
about, south to the marshy Gowanus bay. Upon the 
river shore, north of the Wallabout, was Williamsburgh, 
which was also growing and which had been incorpo- 
rated into a city. But when the horse-cars came and 
men were no longer forced to walk to and from the fer- 
ries or to ride in miserable omnibuses, Brooklyn and 
Williamsburgh became physically one. Williamsburgh 
then gave up its charter and its identity and became lost 
in the growth of a greater Brooklyn. That was re- 
peated slowly but surely throughout all Kings county. 
Within comparatively recent years there came the ele- 
vated railroad — at almost the same time the great mir- 
acle of the Brooklyn bridge — and all the previous 
growth of the town was as nothing. For two decades it 
grew as rapidly as ever grew a " boom-town " in the 
West. The coming of electric city transportation, the 
multiplying of bridges, the boring of the first East river 
tunnel, all helped in this great growth. But the fairy 



BROOKLYN 63 

web of steel that John A. Roebling thrust across the 
busiest part of the East river marked the transformation 
of Brooklyn — a transformation that did not end when 
Brooklyn sold her political birthright and became part 
and parcel of New York. That transformation is still 
in progress. 

We have slipped into history because we have wanted 
you to understand why Brooklyn today is just what she 
is. The submerging of these little Dutch villages with 
their individual customs and traditions has done its part 
in the making of the customs and traditions of the 
Brooklyn of today. For Brooklyn today remains a con- 
gregation of separate communities. You may slip from 
one to the other without realizing that you have done 
more than pass down a compactly built block of houses 
or crossed a crowded street. 

And so it has come to pass that Brooklyn has no main 
street — in the sense that about every other town in the 
United States, big or little, has a main street. If you 
wish to call Fulton street, running from the historic 
Fulton ferry right through the heart of the original city 
and far out into the open country a main street, you will 
be forced to admit that it is the ugliest main street of any 
town in the land : narrow, inconsequential, robbed of its 
light and air by a low-hanging elevated railroad almost 
its entire length. And yet right on Fulton street you 
will find two department-stores unusually complete and 
unusually well operated. New Yorkers come to them 
frequently to shop. The two stores seem lost in the 
dreariness of Fulton street — a very contradiction to that 
highway. 

Yet Brooklyn is a community of contradictions. Here 
we have called Fulton street a possible main street of 
Brooklyn, and yet there is a street in the town, for the 
most part miles removed from it, that is quite as brisk 
by day and the only street in the borough which has any 



64 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

real activity at night. Like that great main-stem of Man- 
hattan it is called Broadway, and it is a wider and more 
pretentious street than Fulton, although in its turn also 
encumbered with an elevated railroad. But up and down 
Broadway there courses a constant traffic; on foot, in 
automobiles, in trolley-cars. Broadway boasts its own 
department-stores, some of them sizable, many hundreds 
of small shops, cheap theaters — and some better — by 
the score. It is an entertaining thoroughfare and yet 
we will venture to say that not one in ten thousand of the 
many transients who come to New York at regular inter- 
vals and who know the Great White Way as well as 
four corners up at home, have ever stepped foot within 
it. We will go further. Of the two million humans 
who go to make the population of Brooklyn ; a large part, 
probably half, certainly a third, have never seen its own 
Broadway. 

This speaks volumes for the provincialism of the great 
community across the East river from Manhattan. Re- 
member all this while that it is a community of com- 
munities, self-centered and rather more intent upon the 
problem of getting back and forth between its homes 
and Manhattan than on any other one thing in the world. 
As a rule, people live in Brooklyn because it is less ex- 
pensive than residence upon the island of Manhattan, 
more accessible and far more comfortable than the 
Bronx or the larger cities of New Jersey that range them- 
selves close to the shore of the Hudson river. It is in 
reality a larger and a better Jersey City or a Hoboken or 
a Long Island City. 

And yet, like each of these three, it is something more 
than a mere housing place for folk who work within con- 
gested Manhattan. It, too, is a manufacturing center of 
no small importance. Despite the transportation obsta- 
cles of being divided by one or two rivers from most of 
the trunk-line railroads that terminate at the port of 




A quiet street on Brooklyn Heights 



BROOKLYN 65 

New York, hundreds of factory chimneys, large and 
small, proclaim its industrial importance. Its output of 
manufactures reaches high into the millions each year. 
And the pay-roll of its factory operatives is annually an 
impressive figure. 

The fact remains, however, that it is a community of 
conunmiities, each pulling very largely for itself. A 
smart western town of twenty-five thousand population 
can center more energy and secure for itself precisely 
what it wishes more rapidly and more precisely than 
can this great borough of nearly two million population. 
Brooklyn has not yet learned the lesson of concentrated 
effort. 

Now consider these communities of old Kings county 
once again. We have touched upon their location and 
their growth ; let us see the manner of folk who made 
them grow. About the second decade of the last cen- 
tury a virtual hegira of New England folk began to 
move toward New York City. The New England states 
were the first portion of the land to show anything like 
congestion, the wonderful city at the mouth of the Hud- 
son was beginning to come into its own — opportunity 
loomed large in the eyes of the shrewd New Englanders. 
They began picking up and moving toward New York. 
And they are still coming, although, of course, in no 
such volume as in the first half of the nineteenth century. 

These New England folk found New York already 
aping metropolitanism — with its unshaded streets and 
its tightly built rows of houses. Over on Long island 
across busy Fulton ferry it was different. There must 
have been something in the early Brooklyn, with its 
gentle shade-trees down the streets and its genial air of 
quiet comfort that made the New Englanders think of 
the pretty Massachusetts and Connecticut towns that they 
had left. For into Brooklyn they came — a steady 
stream which did not lessen in volume until the days 



66 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

of the Civil War. They gave the place a blood infusion 
that it needed. They crowded the old Dutch families 
to one side and laid the social foundations of the Brook- 
lyn of today. 

It was New England who founded the excellent pri- 
vate schools and small colleges of Brooklyn, who early 
gave to her a public-school system of wide reputation. 
It was New England who sprinkled the Congregational 
churches over the older Brooklyn, who gave to their pul- 
pits a Talmage and a Storrs, who brought Henry Ward 
Beecher out from the wilds of the Mid-west and made 
him the most famous preacher that America has ever 
known. It was New England who for forty years made 
Brooklyn Heights — with its exquisite situation on a 
plateau overlooking the upper harbor of New York — 
the finest residential locality in the land. It was New 
England for almost all that time who filled the great 
churches of the Heights to their capacity Sabbath morn- 
ing after Sabbath morning — New England who stood 
for high thought, decent living and real progress in 
Brooklyn. It was New England that made Brooklyn 
eat her pork and beans religiously each Sabbath eve. 

The great churches and the fine houses still stand on 
Brooklyn Heights, but alas, there are few struggles at 
the church-doors any more on Sabbath morning. The 
old houses, the fine, gentle old houses — many of them — 
have said good-by to their masters, their gayeties and 
their glories. Some of them have been pulled down to 
make room for gingerbread apartment structures and 
some of those that have remained have suffered degra- 
dation as lodging- and as boarding-houses. It has been 
hard to hold the younger generation of fashionable 
Brooklyn in Brooklyn. Manhattan is too near, too al- 
luring with all of its cosmopolitan airs, and these days 
there is another steady hegira across the East river — 



BROOKLYN 67 

the first families of Brooklyn seeking residence among 
the smart streets of upper Manhattan. 

There is another reason for this. We have told how 
Brooklyn sold her birthright when she threw off her po- 
litical individuality and made herself a borough of an 
enlarged New York. Perhaps it would be more true 
to say that she mortgaged that birthright the very hour 
when the Brooklyn bridge, then new, took up the full- 
ness of its mighty work. In the weaving of that bridge 
is wrapped one of the little-known tragedies of Brooklyn 
— the immensely human story of Roebling, its designer 
and its builder, who suffered fatal injuries upon it and 
who died a lingering death before it was completed. 
Roebling's apartments were upon a high crest of Brook- 
lyn Heights and the windows of his sick-room looked 
down upon the workmen who were weaving the steel 
web of the bridge. In the last hours of his life he could 
see the creation of his mind, the structure that was about 
to be known as one of the eight modern wonders of the 
world, being made ready for its task of the long years. 

The coming of that first bridge began the transforma- 
tion of Brooklyn ; although for a long time Brooklyn 
did not realize it. The New England element within 
her population did not even realize it when she gave 
up her political identity as a city. Then something else 
happened. Two miles to the north of the first bridge 
another was built — this with its one arm touching the 
East Side of Manhattan — the most crowded residence 
district in the new world — while its other hand reached 
that portion of Brooklyn, formerly known as Williams- 
burgh. We have already spoken of Williamsburgh — 
in its day a city of some promise but for sixty years now 
part of Brooklyn. In the greater part of these sixty 
years it hung tenaciously to its personality. Back of it 
was a great area of regular streets and small houses 



68 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

known as the Eastern District. The folk who lived 
there called themselves Brooklyn folk. Williamsburgh 
was different. Its folk were glad to give themselves 
the name of the old town, although the pattern of its 
streets ran closely into the pattern of the streets of the 
community which had engulfed it. They held them- 
selves a bit by themselves. They had their own shops, 
their own theater, their own clubs, their own churches, 
their own schools. They also had the opportunity of 
seeing the social and the business changes that the de- 
velopment of the first bridge had wrought in old Brook- 
lyn ; how Fulton street from the old City Hall down to 
the ferry-house had lost its gayety and was entering upon 
decadence. 

The Williamsburgh bridge repeated the story of the 
Brooklyn bridge — only in sharper measure. It was 
like a tube lancing the overcrowded mass of the East 
Side of Manhattan. It had hardly been completed be- 
fore it had its own hegira. The Jews of the crowded 
tenements of Rivington and Allen and Essex and all the 
other congested narrow streets east of the Bowery be- 
gan moving over the new bridge and out to a distant 
section of Brooklyn, known as Brownsville. They had 
preempted Brownsville for their own. For a time that 
was all right. Then the wiser men of that wise old race 
began asking themselves " why go to Brownsville, eight 
or nine miles distant, when at the other end of the bridge 
is a fair land for settlement? " 

So began changed conditions for Williamsburgh. For 
a little while it sought to oppose the change, but an ox 
might as well pull against the mighty power of a loco- 
motive, as a community try to defy the working of 
economic law. For a decade now Williamsburgh has 
been " moving out," her houses, her churches, many of 
her pet institutions — going the most part farther out 
upon Long island and there rebuilding under many pro- 



BROOKLYN 69 

tective restrictions. The old Williamsburgh is nearly 
gone. Strange tongues and strange creeds are heard 
within her churches. And some of them have been 
pulled down, along with whole blocks of the gentle red- 
brick houses, to give way to cheap apartments, wrought 
wondrously and fearfully and echoing with the bab- 
bling of unfamiliar words. Nor has the transformation 
stopped at Williamsburgh. The invasion has crept, is 
still creeping into the Eastern District just beyond, trans- 
forming quiet house-lined streets into noisy ways lined 
with crowded apartments. 

It is only within a comparatively little time that the 
older Brooklyn has realized the change that is coming 
upon her. She has known for years of the presence of 
many thousands of Irish and German within her boun- 
daries. They have been useful citizens in her develop- 
ment and have done much for her in both a generous 
and an intelligent fashion. She holds today great col- 
onies of Norse and of the Swedish — down close to the 
waterfront in the neighborhood of the Narrows, and 
her Italian citizens, taken by themselves, would make 
the greatest Italian city in the world. She has the larg- 
est single colony of Syrians in the New World and more 
than half a million Jews. According to reliable esti- 
mates, three-quarters of her adult population today are 
foreign-born. 

Thus can we record the transformation of a com- 
munity. It is a transformation which has created many 
problems, far too many to be recounted here. We have 
only room to show the nature of the change to a town 
where grandfathers used to be all in all and which has 
sleepily awakened to find itself cosmopolitan, its institu- 
tions changing, its future uncertain. There have not 
been a dozen important Protestant churches builded in 
Brooklyn within the past twelve years — and some of 
these merely new edifices for old congregations which 



70 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

have been forced to pick up and move. And there have 
been old churches of old faiths that finally have had to 
give up and close their doors for the final time. Even 
the old custom of singing Christmas songs in the public 
schools has been forbidden. The New England strain 
of Americanism in Brooklyn is dying. 

Brooklyn today has no theater of wide reputation, 
although in Greenwood she has what is deservedly the 
most famous cemetery in America. Hold on, Brooklyn 
may have no theater, but she has a town-hall and a town- 
hall that is worthy of mention here. They do not call 
it the town-hall or the opera-house, but it is known as the 
Academy of Music and it is an institution well worth 
the while of any town. And the Brooklyn Academy of 
Music is the rallying or focal point for so much that 
stands for good within the community that we must see 
how it has come into being. 

It seems that when Brooklyn men and women of to- 
day were Brooklyn boys and girls there stood down on 
Montague street in the oldest part of the town an elder 
Academy of Music and to it they were taken on certain 
great occasions to hear a splendid lecture with magic- 
lantern pictures, the Swiss Bell Ringers, or perhaps even 
real drama or real opera, although play-acting was 
frowned upon in the early days of that barn-like struc- 
ture. Eventually, its directors capitulated entirely. 
Times were changing. So it was that Brooklyn saw the 
great actors and the great singers of yesterday upon the 
stage of its old Academy ; from that stage it heard its 
own preachers, heard such orators as Edward Everett 
and John B. Gough ; crowded into the spacious auditor- 
ium at the Commencement exercises and the amateur 
dramatics of its boys and girls. The old Academy was 
a part of the social fabric of old Brooklyn. 

There comes an end to all temporal things and a win- 



BROOKLYN 71 

ter's morning a full decade ago saw the historic opera 
house go up in a truly theatrical puff of smoke and 
flame. And it was said that day that Brooklyn had lost 
an institution by which it was as well known as the 
Navy Yard or Plymouth church — where Beecher had 
once thundered. Before the ruins in Montague street 
were cool there were demands that the Academy be re- 
built. Brooklynites even then were beginning to feel 
that the old Brooklyn was beginning to pass. Beecher 
was dead ; the last of Talmage's Tabernacles was burned 
and was not to be rebuilt. The idea of becoming a 
second Harlem was appalling. The rebuilding of the 
Academy was a popular measure, a test as to Brooklyn's 
ability to preserve at least a vestige of civic unity unto 
herself. 

It was a hard test and it almost failed. There was 
a time when it seemed as if Brooklyn must give up and 
become the Cinderella of all the boroughs of the new 
New York. But it seems that there were other institu- 
tions in Brooklyn and not the least of these was, and 
still is, the Institute of Arts and Sciences. This is a 
sort of civic Chautauqua. Toward it several thousand 
men and women each pay five dollars a year for the op- 
portunity to gain culture and entertainment at the same 
time. They have lectures, museums, picture-shows, reci- 
tals and the like and this institute has so fat a purse that 
the impresario or prima donna is yet to be found who 
is strong enough to withstand its pleadings. 

This institute came valiantly to the aid of the Acad- 
emy project and saved the day. While it has no pro- 
prietary interest in the new structure, it is its chief ten- 
ant, and the new Academy was planned in detail to meet 
the needs of this popular educational institution. So, 
while the old Academy had a single auditorium, the new 
has a half-dozen big and comfortable meeting-places. 
On a single night Brooklyn can snap its fingers at the 



72 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

Metropolitan Opera House, over across the East river, 
and can gather within its own Temple of Song — a 
spacious and elegant theater which receives the Metro- 
politan company once a week during the season — can 
place another great audience in the adjoining Music 
Hall, with its well-renowned pipe-organ; in still another 
hall hear some traveler show his pretty pictures and tell 
of distant climes and strange peoples ; in a lofty ball- 
room, hold formal reception and dance; and gather in 
a still smaller hall to hear Professor Something-or-other 
discuss the geological strata of Iceland or the like. In 
this way, several audiences, all bent on divers purposes, 
can be assembled in this big and passing handsome struc- 
ture and yet be completely independent of each other. 
The new Brooklyn Academy, wrought after a hard fight, 
is no tiny toy. 

The building was largely a labor of love to those who 
succeeded in getting the subscriptions for it. Its main- 
tenance is today almost a labor of love for its stock- 
holders are not alone the wealthy bankers and the mer- 
chants of the town. Its stock-list is as catholic as its 
endeavors — and they are legion. It is designed to be 
eventually a gathering-place for the butcher, the baker, 
the candle-stick maker; all the sturdy folk who have 
their homes from Greenpoint to Coney island. 

" One thing more," you demand. " How about Coney 
island?" 

Coney island is a part of Brooklyn. It is also the 
most advertised and the most over-rated show place in 
the whole land. While the older Brooklyn used to drive 
down to that sand-spit facing the sea for clams and for 
fish-dinner in the summer days, it is only within the past 
few years that it has been commercialized and an at- 
tempt made to place it upon a business basis. We are 
inclined to think that the attempt, measured in the long 




u 



m 



BROOKLYN -jt^ 

run, has been a failure. It began about ten years ago, 
when the standard of entertainment at the famous beach 
had fallen low. A young man, with a gift for the show 
business, created a great amusement park there by the 
side of the sea. 

" People do not come to Coney island to see the 
ocean," he said. " They come down here for a good 
time." 

It looked as if he was right. His amusement park 
was a great novelty and for a time a tremendous suc- 
cess. It had splendid imitators almost within a stone- 
throw — its name and its purpose were being copied 
all the way across the land. Perhaps people did not 
go to Coney island, after all, to see the cool and lovely 
ocean. 

But after a time the fickle taste of metropolitan New 
York seemed to change. New Yorkers did not seem to 
care quite as much for the gay creations of paint and 
tinsel, the eerie cities that were born anew each night 
in the glories of electric lighting. Fire came to Coney 
island — again and again. It scoured the paint and tin- 
sel cities, thrust the highest of their towers, a blackened 
ruin, to the ground. Pious folk said that God was 
scourging Coney island for its contempt for His laws. 
And the fact remains that it has not regained the pre- 
eminence of its position ten years ago. 

We think that a man who had been out of Brooklyn 
for twenty years and whose recollections of the won- 
derful beach that forms her southern outpost were recol- 
lections of great gardens ; of Patrick Gilmore playing 
inimitable marches in front of one giant hotel and of 
the incomparable Siedl leading his orchestra beside an- 
other, would do better than to return to Coney island. 
Siedl is dead; so is Gilmore and even the huge wooden 
hotel that looked down upon him was pulled apart last 
year to make room for the encroaching streets and houses 



74 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

of a growing Brooklyn. The paint and the tinsel of 
Coney island grows tarnished — and that twenty-year 
exile could find little else than the sea to hold his inter- 
est. And the folk who go to Coney island today seem 
to care very little for the sea — save perhaps as a giant 
bath-tub. 

We think that the absentee of twenty years' standing 
would do far better to go to Prospect Park. That really 
superb pleasure-ground, planned through the foresight 
of a Brooklyn man of half a century ago, remains prac- 
tically unchanged through the years. It remains one of 
the great parks, not only of America, but of the entire 
world. It is the real lion of Brooklyn. It is incom- 
parably finer than its rival, the somewhat neglected Cen- 
tral Park of Manhattan. And alas, Manhattan seems 
to think so, too, for to Prospect Park it sends each bright 
summer Sunday not the best but the roughest of its 
hordes. And Brooklyn sighs when it sees its lovely 
playground stolen from it. 

It is more than playground — Prospect Park. It is 
history. There are no historic buildings in Brooklyn — 
unless we except the Dutch Reformed church out in Flat- 
bush — but all of Prospect Park was once a battlefield 
— the theater of that bitter and bloody conflict of July, 
1776, when Washington was routed by British strategy 
and forced to retire from the city that he needed most 
of all to hold. Through its great meadows Continental 
and Briton and Hessian once marched with murder in 
their hearts. In those great meadows today the boys 
and girls of the Brooklyn of today play tennis ; the older 
men, after the fashion of the Brooklyn of other days, 
their croquet. And annually down the greensward the 
little children of Brooklyn march in brilliant June-time 
pageant. 

The Sunday-school parade of Brooklyn is one of the 
plder institutions of the town that still survives. An- 



BROOKLYN 75 

niially and upon the first Thursday afternoon of June 
the children of all the Sabbath-schools of the borough 
march out upon its streets. There is not room even in 
Prospect Park for all of these — for sometimes there are 
150,000 of them marching of an afternoon; and the 
great distances within Brooklyn must also be brought 
into consideration. But the largest of the individual 
parades always marches in the park — marches like 
trained troopers up past the dignitaries in the reviewing 
stand, and the mayor, and the other city officers, the Gov- 
ernor of the State, not infrequently the President of the 
United States. There is much music, great excitement 
— and ice-cream afterwards. Sharp denominational 
bars are let down and the ice-cream goes to all. And 
the boys and girls who are to be the men and women of 
the Brooklyn of tomorrow and who are to face its great 
problems march proudly by, knowing that the loving eye 
of father or of mother must be upon them. 

The problems of the Brooklyn of tomorrow are not 
to be carelessly dismissed. Nor is the problem of Brook- 
lyn's future in any way hopeless. The changing of 
conditions, the changing of habits, the changing of insti- 
tutions does not of necessity spell utter ruin. Cosmo- 
politanism does not mean the end of all things. We 
have called her dull and emotionless and provincial, and 
yet many of her residents are quick and appreciative — 
well-traveled and well-read — anxious to meet the new 
conditions, to solve the problems that have been en- 
tailed. And we have not the slightest doubt that in the 
long run they will be solved, that Brooklyn will be ready 
and willing to undertake the great problem that has been 
thrust upon her — the fusing of her hundreds of thou- 
sands of foreign-born into first-rate Americans. 



4 

WILLIAM PENN'S TOWN 

TO approach Philadelphia in a humble spirit of abso- 
lute appreciation, you must come to her by one of 
the historic pikes that spread from her like cart-wheel 
spokes from their hub. You will find one of those old 
roads easily enough, for they radiate from her in every 
direction. And when you have found your pike you 
will discover that it is a fine road, even in these days 
when there is a " good-roads movement " abroad in the 
land. You can traverse it into town as best suits your 
fancy — and your purse. If you are fortunate enough 
to own an automobile you will find motoring one of the 
greatest of many joys in the southeastern corner of 
Pennsylvania. If your purse is thin you can have joyous 
health out of walking the long miles such as is denied 
to your proud motorist. And if you have neither money 
nor robust health for hard walking, you will find a trol- 
ley line along each of the important pikes. Philadel- 
phia does not close her most gracious avenues of ap- 
proach to you — no matter who you are or what you are. 

Here we are at the William Penn Inn at dawn of a 
September morning waiting to tramp our way, at least 
to the outskirts of the closely built part of the city. And 
before we are away from the tavern which has kept 
us through the lonely chill of the night, give it a single 
parting glance. It has been standing there at the cross- 
roads of two of the busy pikes of Montgomery county 
for a full century and a half. In all those years it has 

76 



PHILADELPHIA TJ 

not closed its door against man or beast, seeking shelter 
or refreshment. There is a record of one hundred and 
fifty years of hospitahty for which it does not have to 
make apologies. 

Sometimes you will discover small inns of this sort 
along the roadsides of New England, but we do not 
know where else you will find them without crossing the 
Atlantic and seeking them out in the Surrey and the 
Sussex of the older England. Yet around Philadephia 
they are plentiful — with their yellow plastered walls, 
tight green shutters hung against them, their low-ceil- 
inged rooms, their broad fire-places, their stout stone 
out-buildings, and their shady piazzas, giving to the high- 
way. Some of them have quite wonderful signs and 
all of them have a wonderful hospitality — heritage from 
the Quaker manner of living. 

So from the William Penn Inn one may start after 
breakfast as one might have started a century ago — 
to walk his way into the busy town. The four comers 
where the pikes cross stand upon a high ridge — a smooth 
white house of stone, a meeting-house of the Friends, 
and the tavern occupying three of them. The fourth 
gives to a view of distant fields — and such a view ! 
Montgomery is a county of fat farms. You can see the 
rich lands down in the valleys, the shrewder genius re- 
quired to make the more sterile ridge acres yield. And, 
as you trudge down the pike, the view stays with you for 
a long while. 

At the bottom of the hill a little stream and the inevit- 
able toll-gate that seem to hedge in Philadelphia from 
every side. But your payment to the toll-keeper upon 
the Bethlehem pike this morning is voluntary. His smile 
is genial, his gate open. A cigar is to his liking and if 
you would tarry for a little time within the living-room 
of the toll-house he would tell you stories of the pike — 
stories that would make it worth the waiting. But — 



78 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

Philadelphia is miles away, the road to it long and dusty. 
You pick up your way and off you go. 

Little towns and big. Sleepy towns most of them; 
but occasionally one into which the railroad has thrust 
itself and Industry flaunts a smoky chimney up to the 
blue sky. Quaker meeting-houses a plenty, with the tiny 
grave-stones hardly showing themselves through the long 
grass roundabout them. But those same neat stones 
show that the Friends are a long-lived folk, and if you 
lift yourself up to peer through the windows of one of 
these meeting-houses you may see the exquisite simplicity 
of its arrangement. The meeting-house is modern — it 
only dates back to 1823 — and yet it is typical. Two 
masses of benches on a slightly inclined floor, the one side 
for the men, the other for the women. Facing them two 
rows of benches, for the elders. No altar, not even a 
pulpit or reading-desk ; there is an utter absence of dec- 
oration. You do not wonder that the young folk in this 
mad, gay day fail to incline to the old faith of " thee " 
and " thou," and that no more than forty or fifty folk, 
almost all of them close to the evenings of their life 
gather here on the morning of First Day. 

Between the villages and the meeting-houses the solid, 
substantial farmhouses. And what farmhouses ! Farm- 
houses, immaculate as to whitewash and to lawn, with 
cool porches, shaded by brightly striped awnings and 
holding Windsor chairs and big swinging Gloucester ham- 
mocks. This is farming. And the prosperous look of 
the staunch barns belies even thought that this is dilet- 
tante agriculture. It is merely evidence that farmers 
along the great pikes of Montgomery and Bucks and 
Berks have not lost their old-time cunning. And if the 
farmer no longer drives his great Conestoga wagons into 
market at Philadelphia, it is because he prefers to run 
in with his own motor car and let other and more mod- 



PHILADELPHIA 79 

ern transportation methods bring his products to the 
consumer. 

Lunch at another roadside tavern. Bless your heart, 
this one, Hke the meeting-house of the Friends back the 
pike a way, is cursed with modernity. It can only claim 
sixty years of hospitable existence. Mine host can tell 
no fascinating yarn of General Washington having slept 
beneath his roof, even though his tavern is named after 
no less a personage. Instead he relates mournfully how 
a tavern over on the Bristol pike has a tablet in its tap- 
room telling of the memorable night that the members 
of the Continental Congress moving from New York to 
Philadelphia tarried under that roof. Two good anec- 
dotes and a corking name almost make a wayside inn. 
But the anecdotes are not always easy to find. 

After lunch and a good rest the last stages of the 
journey. The little towns grow more closely together; 
there are more houses, more intersecting cross-roads. It 
will be worth your while not to miss the signs upon these. 
The very names on the sign-posts — Plymouth Meeting, 
Wheel Pump, Spring House, Bird-in-hand — seem to pro- 
claim that this is a venerable country indeed. More 
closely do the houses grow together, the farms disap- 
pear, an ancient mile-post thrusts itself into your vision. 
It is stone, but, after the fashion of these Pennsylvania 
Dutch, white-washed and readable. It tells you : 

P 

C.H. 
I M. 

But Philadelphia in reality is no ten miles away. For 
here is Chestnut Hill, the houses numbered, city-fashion 
and the yellow trolley cars multiplied within the busy 
highway which has become a city street without you 
having realized the transition. The smart looking po- 



8o PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

liceman at the corner will tell you that Chestnut Hill 
is today one of the wards of Philadelphia. 

The city at last! You may turn at the top of a long 
hill and for a final instant confront the country beyond, 
rolling, fertile, prosperous, the gentle wooded hills giv- 
ing soft undulation to the horizon. Then look forward 
and face the busy town. For a long time yet your way 
shall be down what seems to be the main street of a 
prosperous village, with its great homes set away back 
in green lawns from the noisy pavement and the public 
sidewalk. There are shops but they are distinctly local 
shops and the churches bear the names of the brisk towns 
that were submerged in the making of a larger Phila- 
delphia — Chestnut Hill, Mount Airy, Germantown. 

And down this same busy street history has marched 
before you. Some of it has been recorded here and 
there in bronze tablets along the street. In front of one 
old house, one learns that General Washington conferred 
with his officers at the eve of the battle of Germantown 
and on the door-steps of another — set even today in its 
own deep grounds — Redcoat and Buff struggled in a 
memorable conflict. For this was the mansion of Judge 
Chew, transformed in an instant of an autumn day from 
country-house to fortress. It was from the windows 
of this old house that six companies of Colonel Mus- 
grave's Fortieth regiment poured down a deadly fire 
upon Mad Anthony Wayne and his men even as they at- 
tempted to set fire to it. The house stood and so stood 
the Fortieth regiment. General Washington lost his 
chance to enter Philadelphia that autumn, and Valley 
Forge was so writ into the pages of history. 

History ! It is spread up and down this main street 
of Germantown, it slips down the side-streets and up the 
alleys, into the hospitable front-doors of stout stone- 
houses. Here it shows its teeth in the bullet-holes of the 
aged wooden fence back of the Johnson house and here 



PHILADELPHIA 8i 

is the Logan house, the Morris house, the Wend house, 
the Concord school and the burying-ground. Any resi- 
dent of Germantown will tell you what these old houses 
mean to it, the part they have played in its making. 

After Germantown — Philadelphia itself. The road 
dips down a sudden hill, loses itself in a short tunnel 
under a black maze of railroad tracks. Beyond the rail- 
road track the city is solidly built, row upon row of nar- 
row streets lined with small flat-roofed brick houses, the 
monotony only accentuated by an occasional church-spire 
or towering factory. In the distance a group of higher 
buildings — downtown Philadelphia — rising above the 
tallest of them Father Penn poised on the great tower 
of the City Hall, No need now for more tramping. 
The fascination of the open country is gone and a trol- 
ley car will take you through tedious city blocks — in 
Philadelphia they call them squares — almost to the door 
of that City Hall. They are tedious blocks. Architec- 
turally Philadelphia is the most monotonous city in 
America with its little red-brick houses. Dr. S. Weir 
Mitchell who has known it through all the years of his 
life has called it the " Red City " and rightly, too. 

For mile after mile of the older Philadelphia is mile 
after mile of those flat-roofed red-brick houses. They 
seemingly must have been made at some mill, in great 
quantities and from a limited variety of patterns. For 
they are almost all alike, with their two or three stories 
of narrow windows and doors ; steps and lintels and cor- 
nice of white marble and invariably set close upon the 
sidewalk line. There is no more generosity than indi- 
viduality about the typical side streets of Philadelphia. 

A single thing will catch your eye about these Phila- 
delphia houses — a small metal device which is usually 
placed upon the ledge of a second-story window. The 
window must be my lady's sitting-room, for a closer 
look shows the device to be a mirror, rather two or 



82 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

three mirrors, so cunningly placed that they will show 
her folk passing up and down or standing upon her door- 
step without troubling her to leave her comfortable rock- 
ing chair. There must be a hundred thousand of these 
devices in Philadelphia. They call them " busy-bodies " 
quite appropriately, and they are as typical of the town 
as its breakfast scrapple and sausage. 

Even a slow-moving Philadelphia trolley car even- 
tually accomplishes its purpose and you will find your- 
self slipping from the older town into the oldest. The 
trolley car grinds around an open square — Franklin 
square, the conductor informs you and then tells you 
that despite its name it is not to be confounded with 
that aristocrat, Rittenhouse square, nor even with the 
more democratic Logan square. You see that for your- 
self. There are mean streets aroundabout this square. 
Oldest Philadelphia assuredly is not putting her best 
foot forward. 

And yet these sordid streets are not without their 
fascination. The ugly monotony of flat-roofs is gone. 
These roofs are high-pitched and bristle with small- 
paned dormer windows and with chimneys, for the 
houses that stand beneath them are very, very old indeed. 
And they are typical of that Georgian architecture that 
we love to call Colonial. A brave show these houses 
once must have made — even today a bit of battered 
rail, a fragment of door or window-casing or fanlight 
proclaims that once they were quality. Fallen to a law 
estate, to the housing of Italians or Chinese instead of 
quiet Quakers, they seem almost to be content that their 
streets have fallen with them ; that few seem to seek 
them out in this decidedly unfashionable corner of 
Philadelphia. 

" Arch street," calls the conductor and it is time to 
get out. It is time to thread your way down one of the 



PHILADELPHIA 83 

earliest streets of the old Red City, time to pay your re- 
spects at the tomb of him who ranked with Pemi, the 
Proprietor, as the greatest citizen. You can find this 
tomb easily — any newsboy on the street can point the 
way to it. He is buried with others of his faith in the 
quiet yard of Christ church at Fifth and Arch streets. 
And in order that the passing world may sometimes stop 
to do him the homage of a passing thought, a single 
section of the old brick wall has been cut away and re- 
placed by an iron grating. Through that grating you 
may see his tomb — a slab of stone sunk flat, for he was 
an unpretentious man — and on its face read : 

"Benjamin and Deborah Franklin. 1790." 

Beyond that graveyard you will see a meeting- 
house of the Friends, one of the best-known in all that 
grave city which their patron founded. It is the meet- 
ing-house of the Free Quakers, and to its building both 
Franklin and Washington, himself, lent a liberal aid. 
And you can still see upon a tablet set in one of its faded 
brick walls these four lines : 

" By General Subscription, 
For the Free Quakers. 
Erected A. D. 1783, 
Of the Empire 8." 

That " Empire 8 " has puzzled a good many tourists. 
In a republic and erected upon the gathering-place of 
as simple a sect as the Friends it provokes many 
questions. 

" They must have thought it was goin' to be an empire 
like that French Empire that was started by the war in 
'75," the aged caretaker patiently will tell you with a 
shake of the head which shows that he has been asked 
that very question many times before and never found 
a really good answer for it. 

A few squares below its graveyard is Christ church 



84 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

itself — a splendid example of the Georgian architecture 
as we find it in the older cities close to the Atlantic sea- 
board. Designed by the architect of Independence Hall 
it is second to that great building only in historic inter- 
est. Its grave-yard is a roster of the Philadelphia aris- 
tocracy of other days. In its exquisitely beautiful 
steeple there hangs a chime of eight bells brought in the 
long ago from old England in Captain Budden's clip- 
per-ship Matilda freight-free. And local tradition re- 
lates that for many years thereafter the approach of Cap- 
tain Budden's Matilda up the Delaware was invari- 
ably heralded by a merry peal of welcome from the 
bells. 

Philadelphia is rich in such treasure-houses of history. 
To the traveler, whose bent runs to such pursuits, she 
offers a rare field. In the oldest part of the city there 
is hardly a square that will not offer some landmark 
ripe with tradition and rich with interest. Time has laid 
a gentle hand upon the City of Brotherly Love. And no 
American, who considers himself worthy of the name, 
can afford not to visit at least once in his lifetime the 
greatest of our shrines — Independence Hall. Within 
recent years this fine old building has, like many of its 
fellows, undergone reconstruction. But the workmen 
have labored faithfully and truthfully and the old State 
House today, in all its details, is undoubtedly very much 
as it stood at the time of the signing of the Declaration. 
It still houses the Liberty Bell, that intrepid and seem- 
ingly tireless tourist who visits all the world's fairs 
with a resigned patience that might well commend itself 
to human travelers. 

Around these landmarks of colonial Philadelphia there 
ebbs and flows the human tides of the modern city. The 
windows of what is today the finest as well as the largest 
printing-house in the land look down upon the tree-filled 




Where William Penn looks down upon the town he 
loved so w^ell 



PHILADELPHIA 85 

square in which stands Independence Hall. A little 
while ago this printing concern looked down upon the 
grave of that earlier printer — Franklin. But growth 
made it necessary to move from Arch street — the bus- 
iest and the noisiest if not the narrowest of all precise 
pattern of parallel roads that William Penn — the Pro- 
prietor of other days — laid back from the Delaware to 
the Schuylkill river. 

One square from Arch street is Market, designed years 
ago by the far-sighted Quaker to be just what it is today 
— a great commercial thoroughfare of one of the met- 
ropolitan cities of America. At its feet the ferries 
cross the Delaware to the fair New Jersey land. Up its 
course to the City Hall — or as the Philadelphian will 
always have it, the Public Buildings — are department 
stores, one of them a commercial monument to the man 
who made the modern department store possible and so 
doing became the greatest merchant of his generation. 
Department stores, big and little, two huge railroad 
terminals which seem always thronged — beyond the 
second of them desolation for Market street — a dreary 
course to the Schuylkill ; beyond that stream it exists as 
a mere utility street, a chief artery to the great residence 
region known as West Philadelphia. 

Arch street. Market street, then the next — Chestnut 
street. Now the heart of your real Philadelphian begins 
to beat staccato. Other lands may have their Market 
streets — your San Francisco man may hardly admit 
that his own Market street could ever be equaled — but 
there is only one Chestnut street in all this land. 

The big department stores have given way to smaller 
shops — shops where Philadelphia quality likes to 
browse and bargain. Small restaurants, designed quite 
largely to meet the luncheon and afternoon tea tastes 
of feminine shoppers show themselves. Upon a prom- 
ment corner there stands a very unusual grocery shop. 



86 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

That is, it must be a grocery shop for that is what it 
advertises itself, but in the window is a papier-mache 
reproduction of the tahle-d'hote luncheon that it serves 
upon its balcony, and within there are quotations from 
Shakespeare upon the wall and " best-sellers " sold upon 
its counters. 

And after Chestnut street, which runs the gamut from 
banks to retail shops and then to smart homes, Walnut 
street. We have been tempted to call Walnut " the 
Street of the Little Tailors," for so many shops have they 
from Seventh street to Broad that one comes quickly to 
know why Philadelphia men are as immaculate to clothes 
as to good manners. Between the little shops of the 
tailors there are other little shops — places where one 
may find old prints, old books, old bits of china or bronze. 
Walnut street runs its course and at the intersection of 
Broad is a group of four great hotels, two of them prop- 
erly hyphenated, after modern fashion. Beyond Broad 
it changes. No shops may now profane it, for it now 
penetrates the finest residential district of Philadelphia. 
Here is the highway of aristocracy and in a little way 
will be Rittenhouse square — the holy of holies. 

Just as Market street in San Francisco forms the sharp 
demarking line between possible and impossible so does 
Market street, Philadelphia, perform a similar service 
for William Penn's city. You must live " below " Mar- 
ket street, which means somewhere south of that thor- 
oughfare. "No one" lives "above Market," which is, 
of course, untrue, for many hundreds of thousands of 
very estimable folk live north of that street. In fact, 
two-thirds of the entire population of Philadelphia live 
north of Market, which runs in a straight line almost 
east and west. But society — and society in Philadel- 
phia rules with no unsteady hand — decries that a few 
city squares south of Market and west of Broad shall 
be its own demesne. You may have your country house 



PHILADELPHIA 87 

out in the lovely suburbs of the town, if you will, and 
there are no finer suburban villages in all the world than 
Bryn Mawr or Ognotz or Jenkintown — but if you live 
in town you must live in the correct part of the town or 
give up social ambitions. And there is little use carrying 
social ambitions to Philadelphia anyway. No city in 
the land, not even Boston or Charleston, opens its doors 
more reluctantly to strange faces and strange names, 
than open these doors of the old houses roundabout Rit- 
tenhouse square. And for man or woman coming resi- 
dent to the town to hope to enter one of Philadelphia's 
great annual Assemblies within a generation is quite 
out of the possibilities. 

Rittenhouse square may seem warm and friendly and 
democratic with its neat pattern of paths and grass- 
plots, its rather genteel loungers upon its shadiest 
benches, the children of the nurse-maids playing beneath 
the trees. But the great houses that look down into it 
are neither warm nor friendly nor democratic. They 
are merely gazing at you — and inquiring — inquiring 
if you please, if you have Pennsylvania blood and breed- 
ing. If you have not, closed houses they are to remain 
to you. But if you do possess these things they will 
open — with as warm and friendly a hospitality as you 
may find in the land. There is the first trace of the 
Southland in the hospitality of Philadelphia, just as her 
red brick houses, her brick pavement and her old-fash- 
ioned use of the market, smack of the cities that rest to 
the south rather than those to the north. 

To give more than a glimpse of the concrete Philadel- 
phia within these limits is quite out of the question. It 
would mean incidentally the telling of her great charities, 
her wonderful museum of art whose winter show is an 
annual pilgrimage for the painters from all the eastern 
portion of the land, of her vast educational projects. 



88 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

Two of these last deserve a passing mention, however. 
One might never write of Philadelphia and forget her 
university — that great institution upon the west bank 
of the Schuylkill which awoke almost overnight to find 
itself man-size, a man-sized opportunity awaiting. And 
one should not speak of the University of Pennsylvania 
and forget the college that Stephen Girard founded. Of 
course Girard College is not a college at all but a great 
charity school for boys, but it is none the less interesting 
because of that. 

The story of Stephen Girard is the story of the man 
who was not alone the richest man in Philadelphia but 
the richest man in America as well. But among all his 
assets he did not have happiness. His beautiful young 
wife was sent to a madhouse early in her life, and Girard 
shut himself off from the companionship of men, save 
the necessity of business dealings with them. He was 
known as a stern, irascible, hard screw of a man — im- 
mensely just but seemingly hardly human. Only once 
did Philadelphia ever see him as anything else — and 
that was in the yellow fever panic at the end of the 
eighteenth century when Stephen Girard, its great mer- 
chant and banker, went out and with his own purse and 
his own hands took his part in alleviating the disaster. 
It was many years afterward that Girard College came 
into being; its center structure a Greek temple, probably 
the most beautiful of its sort in the land, and its stern 
provision against the admission of clergymen even to 
the grounds of the institution, a reflection of its found- 
er's hard mind coming down through the years. Today 
it is a great charity school, taking boys at eight years of 
age and keeping them, if need be, until they are eighteen, 
and in all those years not only schooling but housing 
them and feeding them as well as the finest private-school 
in all this land- 



PHILADELPHIA 89 

And as Girard College and the University of Pennsyl- 
vania stand among the colleges of America, so stands 
Fairmount Park among the public pleasure grounds of 
the country. It was probably the first public park in the 
whole land, and a lady who knows her Philadelphia 
thoroughly has found many first things in Philadelphia 
— the first newspaper, the first magazine, the first circu- 
lating library, the first medical college, the first corporate 
bank, the first American warship, the unfurling of the 
first American flag, not least of these the first real 
world's fair ever held upon this side of the Atlantic. 
For it was the Centennial which not only made Fairmount 
Park a resort of nation-wide reputation, not only opened 
new possibilities of amusement to a land which had al- 
ways taken itself rather seriously, but marked the turning 
of an era in the artistic and the social, as well as the po- 
litical life of the United States. The Centennial was, 
judged by the standard of the greatest expositions that 
followed it, a rather crude affair. Its exhibits were 
simple, the buildings that housed them fantastic and 
barnlike. And the weather-man assisted in the general 
enjoyment by sending the mercury to unprecedented 
heights that entire summer. Philadelphia is never very 
chilly in the summer ; the northern folk who went to it 
in that not-to-be-forgotten summer of 1876 felt that they 
had penetrated the tropics. And yet when it was all 
over America had the pleased feeling of a boy who finds 
that he can do something new. And even sober folk 
felt that a beginning had been made toward a wider view 
of life across the United States. 

It is nearly forty years since the Centennial sent the 
tongues of a whole land buzzing and the two huge struc- 
tures that it left in Fairmount Park have begun to grow 
old, but the park itself is as fresh and as new as in the 
days of its beginning, and there are parts of it that were 



90 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

half a century old before the Centennial opened its doors. 
There are many provisions for recreation within its great 
boundaries, boating upon the Schuylkill, the drives that 
border that river, the further drive that leaves it and 
sweeps through the lovely glen of the Wissahickon. 

The Wissahickon Drive is a joy that does not come to 
every Philadelphian. That winding road is barred to 
sight-seeing cars and automobiles of indiscriminate sort 
because the quality of the town prefers to keep it to 
itself. So runs Philadelphia ; a town which is in many 
ways sordid, which has probably the full share of suf- 
fering that must come to every large city, but which bars 
its fine drive to the proletariat while Rittenhouse square 
blandly wonders why Socialism makes progress across 
the land. Philadelphia does not progress — in any broad 
social sense. She plays cricket — splendidly — is one of 
the few American towns in which that fine English game 
flourishes — and she dispenses her splendid charity in 
the same senseless fashion as sixty years ago. But she 
does not understand the trend of things today — and so 
she bars her Wissahickon Drive except to those who drive 
in private carriages or their own motor car, and delivers 
the finest of the old Colonial houses within her Fairmount 
Park area to clubs — of quality. 

Personally we much prefer John Bartram's house to 
any of those splendid old country-seats within Fairmount. 
To find Bartram's Gardens you need a guide — or a really 
intelligent street-car conductor. For there is not even 
a marking sign upon its entrance, although Philadelphia 
professes to maintain it as a public park. Little has 
been done, however, to the property, and for that he 
who comes to it almost as a shrine has reason to be pro- 
foundly thankful. For the old house stands, with its 
barns, almost exactly as it stood in the days of the great 
naturalist. One may see where his hands placed the 
great stone inscribed " John-Ann Bartram 173 1 " within 



PHILADELPHIA 91 

its gable; on the side wall another tablet chiseled there 
forty years later, and reading: 

" 'Tis God alone, almighty Lord, 
The holy one by me adored." 

Neglect may have come upon the gardens but even 
John Bartram could not deny the wild beauty of these 
untrammeled things. The gentle river is still at the foot 
of the garden, within it, most of the shrubs and trees he 
planted are still growing into green old age. And next 
to his fine old simple house one sees the tangled yew- 
tree and the Jerusalem " Christ's-thorn " that his own 
hands placed within the ground. 

Philadelphia prides herself upon her dominant Amer- 
icanism — and with no small reason. She insists that 
by keeping the doorways to her houses sharply barred 
she maintains her native stock, her trained and respon- 
sible stock, if you please, dominant. She avers that she 
protects American institutions. New York may become 
truly cosmopolitan, may ape foreign manners and for- 
eign customs. Philadelphia in her quiet, gentle way pre- 
fers to preserve those of her fathers. 

One instance will suffice. She has preserved the 
American Sabbath — almost exactly as it existed half a 
century ago. As to the merits and demerits of that very 
thing, they have no place here. But the fact remains 
that Philadelphia has accomplished it. From Saturday 
night to Monday morning a great desolation comes upon 
the town. There are no theaters not even masquerad- 
ing grotesquely as " sacred concerts," no open saloons, 
no baseball games, no moving pictures — nothing exhib- 
iting for admission under a tight statute of Pennsylvania, 
in efifect now for more than a century. And it is only 
a few years ago that the churches were permitted to 
stretch chains across the streets during the hours of their 



92 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

services. A few bad fires, however, with the fire-engines 
becoming entangled with the chains and this custom was 
abandoned. But the churches are still open, and they 
are well attended. It is an old-fashioned Sabbath and 
it seems very good indeed to old-fashioned Americans. 
But upon the other six days of the week she ofifers a 
plenitude of comfort and of amusement. She is accus- 
tomed to good living — her oysters, her red-snappers, 
and her scrapple are justly famous. She is accustomed 
to good playing. In the summer she has far more than 
Fairmount Park. Atlantic City- — our American Brighton 

— is just fifty-six miles distant both in crow-flight 
and in the even path of the railroads, and because of their 
wonderful high-speed service many Philadelphians com- 
mute back and forth there all summer long. 

For the old Red City is a paradise for commuters. 
Those few blocks aroundabout Rittenhouse square that 
her social rulers have set aside as being elect for city 
residence, long since have grown all too small for a great 
city — the great monotonous home sections north of 
Market and west of the Schuylkill are hot and dreary. 
So he who can, builds a stone house out in the lovely 
vicinage of the great city, and when you are far away 
from the high tower of the Public Buildings and find 
two Philadelphians having joyous argument you will 
probably find that they are discussing the relative merits 
of the " Main Line," the " Central Division " or the 
" Reading." 

And yet the best of Philadelphia good times come in 
winter. She is famed for her dances and her dinners 

— large and small. She is inordinately fond of recitals 
and of exhibitions. She is a great theater-goer. And 
local tradition makes one strict demand. In New York 
if a young man of good family takes a young girl of good 
family to the theater he is expected to take her in a car- 
riage. She may provide the carriage — for these days 



PHILADELPHIA 93 

have become shameful — but it must be a carriage none 
the less. In Philadelphia if a young man of good fam- 
ily takes a young woman of good family to the theater 
he must not take her in a carriage, not even if he owns 
a whole fleet of limousines. Therein one can perhaps 
see something of the dominating distinctions between 
the two great communities. 

But what Philadelphia loves most of all is a public 
festival. It does not matter so very much just what is 
to be celebrated as long as there can be a fine parade up 
Broad street — which just seems to have been really de- 
signed for fine parades. On New Year's Eve while New 
York is drinking itself into a drunken stupor, Philadel- 
phia masks and disguises — and parades. On every pos- 
sible anniversary, on each public birthday of every sort 
she parades — with the gay discordancies of many bands, 
with long files of stolid and perspiring policemen or fire- 
men or civic societies, with rumbling top-heavy floats 
that mean whatever you choose to have them mean. 
Rittenhouse square does not hold aloof from these festi- 
vals. Oh, no, indeed ! Rittenhouse square disguises 
itself as grandfather or grandmother or as any of the 
many local heroes and rides within the parade — more 
likely upon the floats. The parades are invariably well 
done. And the proletariat of Philadelphia comes out 
from the side streets and makes a double black wall of 
humanity for the long miles of Broad street. 

There is something reminiscent of Bourbon France 
in the way that Bourbon Rittenhouse square dispenses 
these festivals unto the rest of the town. It is all very 
diaphanous and very artificial but it is very sensuous and 
beautiful withal, and perhaps the rest of the town for a 
night forgets some of its sordidness and misery. And 
the picture that one of these celebrations makes upon 
the mind of a stranger is indelible. 

Like all of such fetes it gains its greatest glory at dusk. 



94 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

As twilight comes the strident colors of the city fade; 
it becomes a thing of shapes and shadows — even the 
restless crowd is tired and softened. Then the genius 
of electricity comes to transform workaday land into 
fairyland and all these shapes and shadows sharpen — 
this time in living glowing lines of fire. It is time for 
men to exult, to forget that they have ever been tired. 
Such is the setting that modern America can give a 
parade. Father Penn stands on his tall tower above it 
all, the most commanding figure of his town. Below 
him the searchlights play and a million incandescents 
glow ; the shuffling of the crowds, the faint cadences of 
the band, the echoes of the cheering crowd come up 
to him. But he does not move. His hands, his great 
bronze hands, are spread in benediction over the great 
gay sturdy city which he brought into existence these 
long years ago. 



5 
THE MONUMENTAL CITY 

IF you approach Philadelphia by dusty highway, it is 
quite as appropriate that you come to Baltimore by 
water highway. A multitude of them run out from her 
brisk and busy harbor and not all of them find their 
way to the sea. In fact one of the most fascinating of 
all of them leads to Philadelphia — an ancient canal dug 
when the railroad was being born and in all these years 
a busy and a useful water-carrier. If you are a tourist 
and time is not a spurring object, take the little steamer 
which runs through the old canal from the city of Wil- 
liam Penn to the city of- Lord Baltimore. It is one of 
the nicest one-day trips that we know in all the east — 
and apparently the one that is the least known. Few 
gazetteers or tourist-guides recommend or even notice 
it. And yet it remains one of the most attractive single- 
day journeys by water that we have ever taken. 

If you will only scan your atlas you' will find that 
nature has offered slight aid to such a single-day voyage. 
She builded no direct way herself but long ago man 
made up the omission. He dug the Chesapeake and 
Delaware canal in the very year that railroading was 
born within the United States. For remember that in 
1829 the dreamers, who many times build the future, 
saw the entire nation a great network of waterways — 
natural and artificial. They builded the Chesapeake and 
Delaware canal bigger than any that had gone before. 
No mere mule-drawn barges were to monopolize it. It 

95 



96 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

was designed for river and bay craft — a highway for 
vessels of considerable tonnage. 



You arrive at this canal after sailing three hours 
down the Delaware river from Philadelphia — past the 
Navy Yard at League island, the piers and jetties at 
Marcus Hook that help to keep navigation open through- 
out the winter and many and many a town whose age 
does not detract from all its charm. The river widens 
into a great estuary of the sea. The narrow procession 
of inbound and outbound craft files through a thin chan- 
nel that finally widens in a really magnificent fairway. 

Suddenly your steamer turns sharply toward the star- 
board, toward another of the sleepy little towns that you 
have been watching all the way down from Philadelphia 
— the man who knows and who stands beside you on 
the deck will tell you that it is Delaware City — and 
right there under a little clump of trees is the beginning 
of the canal. You can see it plainly, with its entrance 
lock and guarding light, and if the day be Sunday or 
some holiday the townfolk will be down under the trees 
watching the steamer enter the lock. It is not much of 
a lock — scarcely eleven inches of raise at the flow of 
the tide — but it serves to protect the languid stretch of 
canal that reaches a long way inland. This gateway 
is a busy one at all times, for the Chesapeake and Dela- 
ware is one of the few old-time canals that has retained 
its prestige and its traffic. An immense freight tonnage 
passes through it in addition to the day-boats and the 
night-boats between Philadelphia and Baltimore. More- 
over, the motor boats are already finding it of great 
service as an important link in the inside water-route 
that stretches north and south for a considerable distance 
along the Atlantic coast. 

Engines go at quarter-speed through the thirteen miles 
of the canal and the man who prefers to take his travel 



BALTIMORE 97 

fast has no place upon the boat. Four miles an hour is 
its official speed limit and even then the ■ " wash " of 
larger craft is frequently destructive to the banks. But 
what of that speed limit with a good magazine in your 
hands and a slowly changing vista of open country ever 
spread before your hungry eyes? You approach swing- 
bridges with distinction, they slowly unfold at the sharp 
order of the boat's whistle, holding back ancient nags 
of little Delaware, drawing mud-covered buggies ; heavy 
Conestoga wagons filled with farm produce for the towns 
and cities to the north ; sometimes a big automobile snort- 
ing and pufifing as if in rage at a few minutes of en- 
forced delay. 

On the long stretches between the bridges the canal 
twists and turns as if finding its way, railroad fashion, 
between increasing slight elevations. Sometimes it is 
very wide and the tow-path side — for sailing-craft are 
often drawn by mules through it — is a slender embank- 
ment reaching across a broad expanse of water. You 
meet whole flotillas of freighters all the way and when 
edging your way past them you throw your Philadelphia 
morning paper into their wheel-houses you win real 
thanks. All the way the country changes its variety — 
and does not lose its fascination. 

So sail to Baltimore. At Chesapeake City you are 
done with the canal, just when it may have begun to tire 
you ever and ever so slightly. Your vessel drops 
through a deep lock into the Back creek, an estuary of 
the Elk river. The Elk river in turn is an estuary of 
Chesapeake bay and you are upon one of the remote 
tendons of that really marvelous system of waterways 
that has its focal point in Hampton Roads and reaches 
for thousands of miles into Maryland, Pennsylvania, 
Virginia and North Carolina. 

You. sweep through the Elk river and then through the 
upper waters of the Chesapeake bay, just born from the 



98 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

yellow flood of the Susquehanna, as the day dies. As 
the sun is nearly down, your ship turns sharply, leaves 
the Bay and begins the ascent of the Patapsco riv£r. 
Signs of a nearby city, a great city if you please, multi- 
ply. There are shipbuilding plants upon distant shores, 
the glares of foundry cupolas, multiplying commerce — 
Baltimore is close at hand. 

And so you sail into Baltimore — into that lagoon- 
like harbor at the very heart of the town. The steam- 
boats that go sailing further down the Chesapeake that 
poke their inquisitive noses into the reaches of the Poco- 
moke, the Pianatank, the Nanticoke, the Rappahannock, 
the Cocohannock, the Big Wicomico and the Little 
Wicomico — all of these water highways of a land of 
milk and honey and only rivaling one another in their 
quiet lordly beauty — sail in and out of Baltimore. 
There are many of these steamers as you come into the 
inner harbor of the city, tightly tethered together with 
noses against the pier just as we used to see horses tied 
closely to one another at the hitching-rails, at fair-time in 
the home town years ago. And they speak the strength 
of the manorial city of Lord Baltimore. For the city 
that sits upon the hills above her landlocked little harbor 
draws her strength from a rich country for many miles 
roundabout. For many years she has set there, confident 
in her strength, leading in progress, firm in resource. 

For well you may call Baltimore — quite as much as 
Philadelphia — a city of first things. There are almost 
too many of these to be recounted here. It is worthy 
of note, however, that in Baltimore came the first use 
in America of illuminating gas, which drove out the 
candle and the oil lamp as relics of a past age. Balti- 
more's historic playhouse, Peale's Museum, was the first 
in all the land to be set aglow by the new illuminant. 
And one may well imagine the glow of pride also that 
dwelt that memorable evening upon the faces of all the 



BALTIMORE 99 

folk who were gathered in that ancient temple of the 
drama. — 

And yet there was an earlier " first thing " of even 
greater importance — the hour of inspiration a century 
ago when an enemy's guns were trained on that stout 
old guardian of the town's harbor, Fort McHenry — an 
engagement to be remembered almost solely by the fact 
that the " Star Spangled Banner " first lodged itself in 
the mind of man. But to our minds the greatest of the 
many, many " first things " of Baltimore was the coming 
of the railroad. For the first real railroad system in 
America — the Baltimore & Ohio — was planned by the 
citizens of the old town — ambitious dreamers each of 
them — as an offset to those rival cities to the north, 
Philadelphia and New York, who were creating canals 
to develop their commerce — at the expense of the com- 
merce of Baltimore. So it was that a little group of 
merchants gathered in the house of George Brown, on 
the evening of the 12th of February, 1827, a date not 
to be regarded lightly in 'the annals of the land. For 
out of that meeting was to come a' new America — a 
growing land that refused to be bound by high mountains 
or wide rivers. Not that the little gathering of Balti- 
more merchants pointed an instant or an easy path to 
quick prosperity. The path of the Baltimore & Ohio 
was hedged about for many years with trials and disap- 
pointments. It was more than a quarter of a century 
before it was a railroad worthy of the name, meeting 
even in part the ideals and dreams of the men who had 
planned it to bring their city in touch with the Ohio and 
the other navigable rivers of the unknown West. And 
at the beginning it was a fog-blinded path that con- 
fronted them. Over in England an unknown youth was 
experimenting with that uncertain toy, the steam loco- 
motive, while a Russian gentleman of known intelligence 
gravely predicted that a car set with sails to go before 



100 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

the wind upon its rails was the most practical form of 
transportation. And it is worthy of mention that the 
earliest of the Baltimore and Ohio steam locomotives was 
beaten in a neck-and-neck race toward the West by a 
stout gray horse. The name of the old locomotive is 
still recorded in the annals of the railroad but that of the 
gray horse is lost forever. 

To know and to love the Baltimore of today, one must 
know and love the Baltimore of yesterday. He must 
know her lore, her traditions, her first families — the 
things that have gone to make the modern city. He 
must see, as through magic glasses, the Baltimore of 
other days, the city that came into her own within a 
very few years after the close of the American Revolu- 
tion. His imagination must depict that stout old mer- 
chant and banker, Alexander Brown ; Evan Thomas, 
the first president of Baltimore's own railroad ; B. H. . 
Latrobe, the first great architect and engineer that a 
young nation should come to know and whose real 
memorial is in certain portions of the great Federal 
(Tapitol at Washington. He must see Winans, the car- 
builder, and Peter Cooper, tinkering with the locomo- 
tive. He may turn toward less commercial things and 
find Rembrandt Peale ; and if his glasses be softened by 
the amber tints of charity he may see a drunkard stag- 
gering through the streets of old Baltimore to die finally 
in a gutter, while some men put their fingers to their 
lips and whisper that " Mr. Foe's Raven may be liter- 
ature after all." 

It is indeed the old Baltimore that you must first come 
to know and to love, if you are ever to understand the 
personality of the Baltimore of today. The new Balti- 
more is a splendid city. Its fine new homes, its many, 
many schools and colleges proclaim that here is a center 



BALTIMORE loi 

of real culture; its great churches, its theaters, its 
modern hotels, its broad avenues are worthy of a city 
of six hundred thousand humans. Druid Hill Park at 
the back of the new Baltimore is worthy of a city of 
a million souls. From it you can ride or stroll down- 
town through Eutaw place, that broad parked avenue 
which is the full pride of the new Baltimore. Suddenly 
you turn to the left, pass through a few mean streets, 
the gray pile of the Fifth Regiment armory, known 
nationally because of the great conventions that have 
been held beneath its spreading walls, see the nearby 
tower of Mount Royal station — after that you are in 
the region of the uptown hotels and theaters — thrust- 
ing themselves into the long lines of tight, red-brick 
houses. These are builded after the fashion of the 
Philadelphia houses, even as to their white marble door- 
steps, and yet possess a charm and distinction of their 
own. 

There are many of these old houses upon this really 
fine street, and you crane your neck at the first intersec- 
tion to catch its name upon the sign-post. " Charles 
Street " it reads and with a little gladsome memory you 
recall a bit of verse that you saw a long time ago in the 
Baltimore Sun. It reads somewhat after this fashion : 

Its heart is in Mount Vernon square, 

Its head is in the green wood : 
Its feet are stretched along the ways 

Where swarms the foreign brood; 
A modicum of Bon Marche, 

That subHmated store — 
And Oh, the treasure that we have 

In Charles street, Baltimore ! 

I love to watch the moving throng, 

The afternoon parade ; 
The coaches rolling home to tea, 

The young man and the maid; 



102 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

The gentlemen who dwell in clubs, 

The magnates of the town — 
Oh, Charles street has a smile for them, 

And never wears a frown! 

The little shops, so cool and sweet; 

The finesse and the grace 
Which mark the mercantility 

Of such a market-place; 
And then beyond the tempting stores 

The quietness that runs 
Into the calm and stately square 

With marble denizens. 

The little and the larger stores 

Are tempting, to be sure ; 
But they are only half the charm 

That Charles street holds to lure; 
For here and there along the way. 

How sweet the homes befall — 
The domicile that holds his Grace, 

The gentle Cardinal. 

The mansions with pacific mien 

Whose windows say " Come in ! " 
The touches of colonialness, 

The farness of the din 
That rolls a city league away 

And leaves this dainty street 
A cool and comfortable spot 

Where past and present meet. 

A measure of la boulevard 

Before whose windows pass 
The madame and the damoisel, 

The gallant and the lass ; 
The gravest and the most sedate, 

The young and gay it calls; 
And, oh, how proper over it — 

The shadows of St. Paul's! 

Dip down the hill and well away, 

The southward track it takes, 
O fickleness, how many quips. 

How many turns it takes ! 



BALTIMORE 103 

But ever in its greensward heart, 

From head to foot we pour 
The homage of our love of it — 

Dear Charles street, Baltimore ! 

1^ You are standing in Mount Vernon square, the very 
heart of Charles street. It is a little open place, shaped 
like a Maltese cross rather than a real square or oblong, 
with a modern apartment house looming up upon it, 
whose fagades of French Renaissance give a slightly 
Parisian touch to that corner of the square. To the rest 
of it, bordered with sober, old-time mansions there is 
nothing Parisian, unless you stand apart and gaze at the 
Monument, which sends its great shaft some two hun- 
dred feet up into the air. There are such columns in 
Paris. 

It is the Monument that dominates Mount Vernon 
square, that adds variety to the vistas up and down 
through Charles street. For eighty years it has stood 
there, straight and true; for eighty years General Wash- 
ington has looked down into the gardens of Charles 
street, upon the children who are playing there, the folk 
coming home at night. It is the most dominating thing 
in Baltimore, which has never acquired the sky-scraper 
habit, and because of it we have always known Balti- 
more as the Monumental City. 

Now turn from the modern Baltimore — right down 
this street which runs madly off the sharp hill of Mount 
Vernon square. Charles street, with all of its shops and 
gentle gayety, is quickly left behind. At the foot of the 
hill runs St. Paul street and it is a busy and a somewhat 
sordid way. But at St. Paul street rises Calvert station 
and since you are to see so many great railroad stations 
before you are done with the cities of America, take a 
second look at this. Calvert station is not great. It is 
not magnificent. It is not imposing. It is old, very, 



I04 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

very old — as far as we know the oldest of all the im- 
portant stations that are still in use today. From its 
smoky trainshed the trains have been going up the 
Northern Central toward Harrisburg and the Susque- 
hanna country — the farther lands beyond — since 1848. 
And that trainshed, with its stout-pegged wooden-trussed 
roof held aloft on two rows of solid stone pillars, seems 
good for another sixty-five years. 

Old Baltimore holds tightly to its ideals of yesterday. 
Over in another of the older parts of the town you can 
still find Camden station, which in 1857 was not only 
proclaimed as the finest railroad terminal that was ever 
built but that ever could be built, still in use and a busy 
place indeed. The Eutaw House, spared by the great 
fire of a decade ago, but finally forced to close its doors 
in the face of the competition of better located and more 
elaborate hostelries, still stands. The ancient cathedral 
remains a great lion, the old-time red shaft of the Mer- 
chants' Tower still thrusts itself into the vista as you look 
east from the Monument square there in front of the 
Post Office. Across the harbor you can find Fort Mc- 
Henry, as silent sentinel of that busy place. Balti- 
more does not easily forget. 

And here, as you plunge down into the little congested 
district roundabout Jones Falls you are at last in the 
really old Baltimore. The streets are as rambling and 
as crooked as old Quebec. Some of their gutters still 
run with sewage although it is to be fairly said to the 
credit of the town that she is today fast doing away 
with these. And once in a time you can stand at the 
open door of an oyster establishment and watch the 
negroes shocking those bivalves — singing as they work. 
For just below Baltimore is a great habitat of the oyster 
as well as of the crab, to say nothing of some more aristo- 
cratic denizens — the diamond-back terrapin for in- 
stance. Boys with trays — many of them negroes — 



BALTIMORE 105 

walk the wharves and streets of old Baltimore selling 
cold deviled crabs at five cents each. Those crabs are 
uniformly delicious, and the boys sell them as freely on 
the streets as the boys down in Staunton and some other 
Virginia towns sell cold chicken. 

f Now we are across Jones Falls * — that unimpressive 
stream that gullies through Baltimore — and plunging 
into Old Town. Other cities may boast their quartiers, 
Baltimore has Old Town, And she clings to the name 
and the traditions it signifies with real affection. Here 
is indeed the oldest part of Old Town and if we search 
quietly through its narrow, crowded streets we may still 
see some of the old inns, dating well back into the eight- 
eenth century, their cluttered court-yards still telling in 
eloquent silence of the commotion that used to come when 
the coaches started forth up the new National Pike to 
Cumberland or distant Wheeling, north to York and 
Philadelphia. And everywhere are the little old houses 
of that earlier day. Even in the more distinctively resi- 
dential sections of the town many of them still stand, 
and they are so very much like toy houses enlarged under 
some powerful glass that we think of Spotless Town 
and those wonderful rhymes that we used to see above 
our heads in the street cars. But they represent Balti- 
more's solution of her housing problem. 

For she has no tenements, even few high-grade apart- 
ments. She has, like her Quaker neighbor to the north, 
mile upon mile of little red-brick houses, all these also 
with white door-steps — marble many times, and in other 
times wood, kept dazzling and immaculate with fresh 
paintings. In these little houses Baltimore lives, j You 

* During the past year Baltimore has made a very creditable 
progress toward building an important commercial street over 
Jones Falls ; thus transforming it into a hidden, tunneled sewer. 
Residents of the city will not soon forget, however, that it was 
at Jones Falls that the engines of the New York Fire Depart- 
ment took their stand and halted the great fire of 1904. 

E. H. 



io6 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

may find here and there some one of them no more than 
ten or twelve feet in width and but two stories high, but it 
is a house and while you occupy it, your own. And the 
rent of it is ridiculously low — compared even with the 
lower-priced apartments and the tenements of New York. 
That low rent, combined with the profuse and inexpen- 
sive markets of the town, makes Baltimore a cheap place 
in which to live. The proximity of her parks and the 
democracy of her boulevards makes her a very com- 
fortable place of residence — even for a poor man. And 
you may live within your little house and of a summer 
evening sit upon your " pleasure porch " as comfortably 
as any prince. 

In Baltimore it is always a " pleasure porch," thus 
proclaiming her as a real gateway to the old South — the 
South of flavor and of romance. In Baltimore, you al- 
ways say " Baltimore City," probably in distinction to 
Baltimore county, which surrounds it, and your real Bal- 
timorean delights to speak of his morning journal as 
" that Sun paper." The town clings conservatively to 
its old tricks of speech, and if you pick up that news- 
paper you will perhaps find the advertisement of an auc- 
tioneer preparing to sell the efifects of some family " de- 
clining housekeeping." 

That same fine conservatism is reflected in her nomen- 
clature — first as you see it upon the shop signs and the 
door-plates. She has not felt the flood of foreign in- 
vasion as some of our other cities have felt it. She is 
not cosmopolitan — and she is proud of that. And the 
names that one sees along her streets are for the most 
part the good names of English lineage. Even the names 
of the streets themselves are proof of that — Alpaca and 
April alleys, Apple, and Apricot courts, Crab court, Cuba 
street, China street — which takes one back to the days 
of the famous clipper ships which sailed from the 
wharves of Baltimore — Featherbed lane, Johnny-cake 



BALTIMORE 107 

road, Maidenchoice lane, Pen Lucy avenue, Sarah Ann 
street — who shall say that conservatism does not linger 
in these cognomens? And what shall one say of con- 
servatism and Baltimore's devotion to Charles street, 
sending that famous thoroughfare up through the county 
to the north as Charles Street avenue and then as Charles 
Street Avenue extension? 

Do not mistake Baltimore conservatism for a lack of 
progress. You can hardly make greater mistake. For 
Baltimore today is constantly planning to better her har- 
bor, to improve the beginning that she has already made 
in the establishment of municipal docks — her jealousy 
of a certain Virginia harbor far to the south is working 
much good to herself. She is constantly bettering her 
markets — today they are not only among the most won- 
derful but the most efficient in the whole land. And to- 
day she is planning a great common terminal for freight 
right within her heart — a sizable enterprise to be erected 
at a cost of some ten millions of dollars. For she is de- 
termined that her reputation for giving good living to 
her citizens and at a low cost shall be maintained. She 
realizes that much of that cost is the cost of food dis- 
tribution, and while almost every other city in the land 
is floundering and experimenting she is going straight 
ahead — with definite progress in view. Such purpose 
and such plans make first-rate aids to conservatism. 

" Baltimore can prove to any one who will give her 
half a chance, what a good, a dignified, a charming thing 
it is to be an American town," writes one man of her. 
He knows her well and he does not go by the mark. 
Baltimore is good, is dignified, is altogether charming. 
And she is an American town of the very first rank. 



THE AMERICAN MECCA 

JUST as all the roads of old Italy led to Rome so do 
all the roads of this broad republic lead to Washing- 
ton — its seat of government. At every season of the 
year travelers are bound to it. It is in the spring-time, 
however, that this travel begins to assume the propor- 
tions of the hegira. It is a patriotic trek — essentially. 
And the slogan " Every true American should see Wash- 
ington at least once " has been changed by shrewd rail- 
road agents and hotel-keepers to " Every true x\merican 
should see Washington once a year," although some of 
the true Americans after one experience with Washing- 
ton hotel-keepers are apt to say that once in a life-time 
is quite enough. But the national capital is worth all 
the hardships, all the extortions large and small. It is 
a patriotic shrine and, quite incidentally, the most beau- 
tiful city in America, if not the world, and so it is that 
there is not a month in the year that Americans are not 
pouring through its gateway — the wonderful new Union 
station. 

That terminal still opens the eyes of those folk who 
come trooping down toward the Potomac — old fellows 
who still remember the last time they went to Washing- 
ton and the entire country was a-bristle with military 
camps and bristling guns, little shavers entering for the 
first time the City of Perpetual Delights, lovelorn bridal 
couples, excursions from Ohio, round-trips from off back 
in the Blue Ridge mountains, parties from up in Penn- 
sylvania — the broad concourse of the railroad station at 

io8 



WASHINGTON 109 

Washington is a veritable parade-ground of latent and 
varied Americanism. 

The members of a self-appointed Reception Committee 
are waiting for the tourists — just outside the marble 
portals of the station. Some of them are hotel-runners, 
others are cab-drivers, but they are all there and their 
eyes are seemingly unerring. How quickly they detect 
the stranger who has heard the " true American " slogan 
for the first time, and who has the return part of his ten- 
day limit ticket tucked safely away in his shabby old wal- 
let. 

" Seein' Washington ! A brilliant trip of two hours 
through the homes of wealth an' fashion, with a lecture 
explainin' every point of interest an' fame." 

Here is the first welcoming cry of the Reception Com- 
mittee — and seasoned tourist that you are, you do not 
yield to it. You shake your head in a determined ** no " 
to the barker at the station but a little while later over in 
Pennsylvania avenue you succumb. Two dashing young 
black-haired ladies — slender symphonies in white — are 
sitting high upon one of the large travel-stained peripa- 
tetic grandstands. On another sight-seeing automobile 
over across the street are two very blondes — in black. 
You cast your fate upon the ladies with the black hair 
and the white dresses and climb upon the wagon with 
them. At intervals you look enviously upon mere 
passers-by. Then the intervals cease. Two young men 
climb upon the wagon and boldly engage themselves in 
conversation with the young ladies. At the very moment 
when you are about to interfere in the name of propriety, 
you discover that the young ladies seem to like it. At 
any rate you decide it will be interesting to listen to 
their conversation and the important young man who 
is in charge of the grandstand has taken your non-re- 
fundable dollar for the trip. Otherwise you might still 
change in favor of the blondes who are sitting huddled 



no PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

under a single green sunshade and who look bored with 
themselves. 

You sit . . . and sit . . . and sit. An old lady finds 
her cumbersome way up on the front seat and fumbles 
for her dollar. A deaf gentleman perches himself upon 
the rear bench. After which you sit some more. Three 
or four more true Americans find their way upon the 
wagon. You still sit. An elderly couple crowds in upon 
your bench. The man has whiskers like Uncle Joe Can- 
non or a cartoon, but his wife seems to have subdued him, 
after all these years. The sitting continues. Finally, 
when patience is all but exhausted, the personal conduc- 
tor of the car shouts " All aboard " and the two young 
ladies in white duck drop off nimbly. For a moment 
their acquaintances seem non-plussed. Then they under- 
stand, for they, too, jump off and follow after. 

The chauffeur fumbles with the crank of the top-heavy 
car. It does not respond readily. The chauffeur per- 
spires and the personal conductor — who will shortly 
emerge in the role of lecturer — offers advice. The 
chauffeur softly profanes. Interested spectators gather 
about and begin to make comments of a personal nature. 
Finally, when the chauffeur is about to give it all up and 
you and yours are to be plunged into mortification — ■ 
you can safely suspect those young blondes on the rival 
enterprise across the way of laughing in their tight little 
sleeves at you — the engine begins to snort violently and 
throb industriously. The chauffeur wipes the perspira- 
tion from his brow with the back of his hand and smiles 
triumphantly at the scoffers across the street. 

He jumps into his seat briskly, as if afraid that the car 
might change its mind, and you are off. The ship's com- 
pany settles into various stages of contentment. Seein' 
Washington at last. . . . The lecturer reaches for his 
megaphone. 

But not so fast — this is Washington. 



WASHINGTON in 

The real start has not yet begun. All these are but 
preliminaries to the start of the real start. You are not 
going to bump into the world of wealth and fashion as 
quickly as all this. You go along Pennsylvania avenue 
for another two squares and for twenty minutes more 
traffic is solicited. The novelty wears off and content- 
ment ceases. 

" I don't purpose to pay a dollar for a ride and spend 
the hull time settin' 'round like a public hack in front of 
th' hotels," says a bald-headed man and he voices a rising 
sentiment. He is from Baltimore and he is frankly 
skeptical of all things in Washington. The lecturer and 
the chauffeur confer. The performance with the engine 
crank is given once again and you finally make a real 
start. 

Entertainment begins from that start. But you get 
history as a preliminary to wealth and fashion, for it 
so happens that wealth and fashion do not dwell in that 
part of Pennsylvania avenue. 

" Site of first p'lice station in Washington," the young 
man rattles out through his megaphone. " Oldest hotel 
in Washington. Washington's Chinatown. Peace Mon- 
ument. Monument to Albert Pike, Gran' Master of the 
Southern Masons ; only Confederate monument in the 
city. Home o' Fightin' Bob Evans, there with the tree 
against the window. His house was — " 

" V/hat was that about the Confederates ? " the deaf 
man interrupts from the back seat. The lecturer, with 
an expression of utter boredom, repeats. At this mo- 
ment the chauffeur comes into the limelight. He recog- 
nizes a girl friend on the sidewalk and in the enthusiasm 
of that recognition nearly bumps the grandstand into a 
load of brick. When order is restored and you go for- 
ward in a straight course once again, the lecturer re- 
sumes — 

" On our right the United States Pension Office, the 



112 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

largest brick buildin' in the world and famed for the in- 
augural balls it has every four years — only it didn't have 
one las' time. But when Mr. Taft was inaugurated 
nine thousand couples were a-waltzin' an — " 

Some of the folk upon the car look shocked. They 
come from communities where dancing is taboo, and the 
lecturer seems to hint at an orgy there in one of the tax- 
payer's buildings. 

" There is also the largest frieze in the world 'round 
that building," he continues, " an' it ain't the North Pole, 
either. Eighteen hundred soldiers and sailors — count 
'em some day — marchin' there, the sick an' the wounded 
laggin' behind, the trail of martyr's blood markin' their 
path, comrade helpin' comrade — all a-bringin' honor an' 
glory to the flag." 

He drops tlie megaphone to catch his breath and 
whispers into your ear. He realizes that you have under- 
stood him — and half apologizes for himself: 

" They like that," he explains, in an undertone. " A 
little oratory now an' then tickles 'em. An' then they 
like this : " 

The megaphone goes into action. 

" We are travelin' west in F street, the Wall street of 
Washington, the place of the banker an' broker." 

" Ain't we goin' to see the houses of the fashionable 
people?" demands the wife of the bald-headed Balti- 
morean. " Now over in our city Eutaw place is — " 

" We are comin' there, madam," says the lecturer, 
courteously. 

And in a little while you do come there. You sit back 
complacently in your seat and smack your mental lips 
at the sight of the mansion of the man who owns three 
banks ; of that of him who. the lecturer solemnly affirms, 
is the president of the Whiskey Trust ; at a third where 
dwells " the richest minister of the United States." A 
little school-teacher, who has come down from Hartford. 



WASHINGTON 113 

Conn., makes profuse notes in a neat leather-covered 
book. It is plain to see that she takes the duty of the 
true Americans as a serious enterprise, indeed. 

You all start and look when ex-Speaker Cannon's 
house is passed, and you catch a glimpse of the old man 
coming down the door-steps. The public interest in him 
has not seemed to cease with his retirement from the 
center of the national arena. But it has lessened. You 
realize that a moment later when your peregrinating 
grandstand rolls by a solemn-faced man walking down 
the street — a big man in a black suit, his face hidden by 
a black slouch hat. 

" Mr. Bryan," whispers the lecturer, this time with- 
out the megaphone. 

It is quite unnecessary. For a brief instant Washing- 
ton is forgotten. In that instant the crowd regards the 
second or third best-known man in America — silently 
and curiously. The lecturer brings them back to their 
dollar's worth. He boldly points out the Larz Anderson 
house as the home of " the richest real estate man in the 
country," the new home of Perry Belmont as having 
" three stories above ground and three below " — an ex- 
cursionist from Reading, Pa., interrupts to ask how much 
coal they will need to fill such a cellar — you see the home 
of the late Mr. Walsh with " a forty-five hundred dollar 
marble bench in the yard, all. cut out of a single piece," 
the sedate and stately house of Gififord Pinchot. 

It is pleasant, driving through these smooth Washing- 
ton streets, even if the low-hanging tree branches do 
make you jump and start at times. You go up this 
street, down that, past long rows of neat Colonial houses 
that some day are going to look neat and old — turn by 
one of the lovely open squares of the city. They have 
just erected a statue there — grandstands are already 
going up around about it and there will be speeches and 
oratory before long. 



114 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

Washington is constantly in the throes of an epidemic 
of dedications. There are now more statues in the city 
than Mr. Baedeker ever can tally and each of them has 
undergone dedication — at least once. The President 
has been corralled, if possible, although Mr. Wilson has 
already shown a reticence for this sort of thing. If the 
President simply will not come, a Governor or a rather 
famous Senator will do as well. And in the far pinch 
there are many Representatives in Washington who are 
mighty good orators. You can almost get a Representa- 
tive at the crook of your finger, and you cannot have a 
real dedication without a splurry of oratory. It is al- 
most as necessary as music — or the refreshments. 

As you slip by one of those statues — " the equestrian 
figure of General Andrew Jackson on horseback " — ^the 
gentleman from Reading demands that the car stop. He 
wants to ask a question and apparently he cannot ask a 
question and be in motion at the same time. So he de- 
mands that the car be stopped. It is one of the privileges 
of a man who has paid a perfectly good dollar for the 
trip. The car stops — abruptly. 

You will probably recall that Jackson statue, standing 
in the center of Lafayette square and directly in front 
of the White House. Perhaps General Jackson rode a 
horse that way and perhaps he did not, but there the 
doughty old warrior sits, his bronze mount plunging high 
upon hind legs. 

" What is ever going to keep that statue from falling 
over some day ? " demands the man from Reading. He 
has a keen professional interest in the matter, for he has 
been a blacksmith up in that brisk Pennsylvania town 
for many a year. 

The lecturer explains that the tail of the bronze horse 
is heavily weighted and that the whole figure is held in 
balance that way. But the blacksmith is Pennsylvania 
Dutch — of the sort not to be convinced in an instant — 




Through the portals of this Union Station i^un.c- all the 
visitors to Washington 



WASHINGTON 115 

and he sets forth his opinion of the danger at length, to 
the bald-headed man from Baltimore, who sits just be- 
hind him. 

The lecturer goes forward once again. You look at the 
proud old mansion that faces Lafayette square, and gasp 
when the intelligent young man with the megaphone tells 
you that it was given to Daniel Webster by the American 
people and that he gambled it away. You notice the 
house that Admiral Dewey got from the same source, 
and wonder if he could not have contrived possibly to 
gamble it away. You nose St. John's church — " the 
Church of State," the young man calls it — and turn 
into Sixteenth street. But alas, it is Sixteenth street no 
longer. Through a bit of the official snobbery that fre- 
quently comes to the surface in the governing of the na- 
tional capital that fine highway has been named " the 
Avenue of the Presidents," a name that is so out of har- 
mony of our fine American town that it will probably 
be changed in the not distant future. 

The lecturer points your attention to another house. 

" The Dolly Madison Hotel, for women only," he an- 
nounces. " No men or dogs allowed above the first floor. 
The only male thing around the premises is the mail-box 
and it is — " 

He has gone too far. You fix your steely glance of 
disapproval upon him and he withers. He drops his 
megaphone and whispers into your ear once again : 

" I hate to do it," he apologizes, " but I have to. The' 
boss says : — ' Give 'em wit an' humor, Harry, or back 
you goes to your old job on a Fourteenth street car.' 
Think of givin' that bunch wit an' humor! Look at 
that old sobersides next to you, still a-worryin' about that 
statue ! " 

Wit and humor it is then. Wit and humor and wealth 
and fashion. It almost seems too little to ofiFer a mere 



ii6 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

dollar for such joys. You make the turn around the 
drive in back of the White House and you miss the 
Taft cow — which in other days was wont to feast upon 
the greensward. You ask the lecturer what became of 
Mr. Taft's cow. 

" She was deceased," he solemnly explained, " a year 
before his term was up — of the colic." 

And of that somewhat ambiguous statement you can 
make your own translation. 

The sight-seeing car stops at the little group of hotels 
in Pennsylvania avenue, near the site of the old Balti- 
more & Potomac railroad station. The lecturer begins 
to use his megaphone to expatiate upon the advantages 
of a trip to Arlington y/hich is about to begin, but Ar- 
lington is too sweetly serious a memorial to be explored 
by a humorous motor-car. And — in the offing — you 
are seeing something else. Another car of the line upon 
which you have been voyaging is moored at the very 
point from which you started, not quite two hours ago. 
Upon that car sit the same two young black-haired ladies. 
Two young men are climbing up to sit beside them. 
Your gaze wanders. On the rival car across the way the 
two very blondes in black are still holding giggling con- 
versation. Your suspicions are roused. 

Do they ever ride? 

Apparently not. Tomorrow they will be upon the cars 
again, the blondes upon the right, the brunettes upon the 
left. And the day after tomorrow they will sit and wait 
and appear interested and in joyous anticipation. And 
if it rains upon the following day they will don their 
little mackintoshes and talk pleasantly about its being 
nearly time to clear up. 

Now you know. Seein' Washington employs cappers. 
Those young ladies sit there to induce dollars — faith. 



WASHINGTON 117 

'tis seduction, pure and simple — from narrow masculine 
pockets. You do know, now. 

If we are giving much space to the tourist view of 
Washington it is because the tourist plays so important 
a part in the life of the town. He is one of its chief as- 
sets and, seriously speaking, there is something rather 
pathetic in the joy that comes to the faces of those who 
step out from the great portals of the new station for 
the very first time. There is something in their very 
expressions that seems to express long seasons of saving 
and of scrimping, perhaps of downright deprivation in 
order that our great American mecca may finally be 
reached. You will see the same expressions upon the 
faces of the humbler folk who go to visit any of the 
great expositions that periodically are held across the 
land. 

That expression of eminent satisfaction — for who 
could fail to see Washington for the first time and not be 
eminently satisfied — reaches its climax each week-day 
afternoon in the East Room of the White House. If 
President Wilson has reached a finer determination than 
his determination to let the folk of his nation-wide fam- 
ily come and see him, we have yet to hear of it. And 
there is not a man or woman in the land who should be 
above attending the simple official reception that the Pres- 
ident gives each afternoon at his house to all who may 
care to come. 

There is little red-tape about the arrangements in ad- 
vance. The tendency to hedge the President around with 
restrictions has been completely offset in the present ad- 
ministration. A note or a hurried call upon the Presi- 
dent's secretary in advance — a card of invitation is 
quickly forthcoming. And at half-past two o'clock of 
any ordinary afternoon you present yourself at the east 



ii8 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

wing of the White House. Your card is quickly scruti- 
nized and you may be sure of it that the sharp-eyed 
Irishman who is more than policeman but rather a men- 
tor at the gate, has scrutinized you, too. His judgment 
is quick, rarely erring. And unless you meet his entire 
approval, you are not going to enter the President's 
house. But he has approved and before you know it you 
— there are several hundred of you — are slipping for- 
ward in a march into the basement of the Executive 
Mansion and up one of its broad stairs. There are nu- 
merous attendants along the path. 

" Single file ! " shouts one of them and single file you 
all go — just as you used to play Indian or follow-your- 
leader in long-ago days. And you all step from the 
stair-head into the East Room, while the women-folk 
among you conjure imagination to their aid and endeavor 
to see that lovely apartment dressed for a great reception 
or, best of all, one of the infrequent White House wed- 
dings. 

Other attendants quickly and easily form you into a 
great crescent, two or three human files in width and ex- 
tending in a great sweep from a vast pair of closed doors 
which give to the living portion of the house. No one 
speaks, but every one takes stock of his neighbors. If 
it is in vacation season there are many boys and girls — 
for whole schools make the Washington expedition in 
these days — there may be several Indians in war-paint 
and feather making ceremonious visit to the Great White 
Brother. If you are traveled you will probably see 
New England or Carolina or Kansas or California in 
these folk, whose hearts are quickened in anticipation. 

Suddenly — the great door opens, just a little. A thin, 
wiry man in gray steps into the room and takes his posi- 
tion near the head of the crescent. An aide in undress 
military uniform stands close to him, two sharp-faced 
young men stand a little to the left of them and act as a 



WASHINGTON 119 

human Scylla and Charybdis through which all must pass. 
There are no preliminaries — no hint of ceremony. 
Within five seconds of the time when the President has 
taken his place, the line begins to move forward. In 
twenty minutes he has shaken hands with three or four 
hundred people and the reception is over. But in the 
brief fraction of a single minute when your hand has 
grasped that of the President you feel that he knows no 
one else on earth. He concentrates upon you and that, 
in itself, is a gift of which any statesman may well be 
proud. And while you are thinking of the pleasure that 
his word or two of greeting has given you, you awake to 
find yourself out of the room and hunting for your um- 
brella at the check-stand in the lower hall. The pleasant 
personal feeling is with you even after you have left 
the shelter of the White House roof. It is showering 
gently and a man under a tree is murmuring something 
about Secretary Bryan seeing visitors at a quarter to 
five but neither makes impress upon you. You are 
merely thinking how much easier it is to come to see the 
President of the greatest republic in the world than many 
a lesser man within it — railroad heads, bankers, even 
petty politicians. 

In other days it was not as easy to gain admittance to 
the President, but the tourist who was not above guile 
could be photographed shaking hands with the great per- 
son. A place on that always alluring Pennsylvania ave- 
nue did the trick. You stepped in a canvas screen into 
the place of the enlarged image of a sailor who was once 
snapped shaking hands with President Taft. When the 
picture was finished you were where the sailor had been, 
and you had a post-card that would make the folks back 
home take notice. True you were a little more prominent 
in it than the President, but then Air. Taft was not pay- 
ing for the picture. In fact Mr. Taft, when he heard of 
the practice, grew extremely annoyed and had it stopped, 



120 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

so ending abruptly one of the tourist joys of Wash- 
ington. 

After the White House, the Capitol is an endless source 
of delight to those who have come to Washington from 
afar. A little squad of aged men, who have a wolfish 
scent for tourists, act as its own particular Reception 
Committee. These old men, between their cards and the 
sporting extras of the evening papers, condescend to act 
as guides to the huge building. We shall spare you the 
details of a trip through it with them. It is enough to 
say that they are, in the spirit at least, sight-seeing car 
lecturers grown into another generation. Their quar- 
rels with the Capitol police are endless. On one memor- 
able occasion, a captain of that really efficient police-force 
had decided to mark the famous whispering stone in 
the old Hall of Representatives with a bit of paint. 
You can read about that whispering stone in any of the 
tourist-guides which the train-boy sells you on your way 
to Washington. Suffice it now to say that when you have 
found this phonetic marvel and have stood upon it your 
whisper will be heard distinctly in a certain far corner 
of the gallery of the room. It is an acoustic freak of 
which the schoolboys out in Racine can tell you better 
than I. And it is one of the prized assets of the Capitol 
guides. The police captain forgot that when he set out 
to mark it. 

It came back to him the evening of that day, however, 
when the building had been cleared. He chanced to cross 
the old hall and, looking for his marker, found three of 
the guides upon their knees carefully restoring it 
to absolute uniformity with its neighbors. And the 
captain nearly lost his job. He had sought to interfere 
with prerogative, and prerogative is a particularly sacred 
thing at the Federal capital — as we shall see in a little 
while. 



WASHINGTON 121 

Late in a pleasant afternoon all Washington seems to 
walk in F street. The little girls come out of the 
matinees, the bigger girls drift out from the tea-rooms, 
there is a swirl of motor vehicles — gasoline and electric 

— but the tourist knows not of all this. The gay flam- 
meries of Pennsylvania avenue hold him fascinated. 
Souvenir shops rivet him to their counters. Post-cards 

— grave, humorous, abominable — urge themselves upon 
him. But if all these fail — they have post-cards now- 
adays of the high schools in each of the little Arizona 
towns — here upon a counter are the little statuettes of 
pre-digested currency. 

Mr. Lincoln in $10,000 of greenbacks. And yet that 
money today could not buy one drop of gasoline, let 
alone an imported touring automobile, for once it has 
passed through the government's macerating machine it 
is only fit for the sculptor. Three thousand dollars go 
into a Benjamin Harrison hat, fifteen thousand into a 
model of the Washington Monument that looks as if it 
were about to melt beneath a summer sun. Twenty 
thousand doll — stay, there is a limit to credulity. And 
you refuse to buy without a signed certificate from the 
Treasury Department as to these valuations. 

Most of the tourists do buy, however. They seem to 
be blindly credulous — these folk who feel their way to 
Washington. It was not so very many spring-times ago 
that a rumor worked afloat of a dull Sabbath to the ef- 
fect that the Washington Monument was about to fall. 
That rumor slipped around the town with amazing 
rapidity — Washington is hardly more than a gossipy, 
rumor-filled village after all. Two or three thousand 
folk went down to the Mall to be present at the fall. No 
two of them could agree as to the direction in which the 
shaft would tumble and they all made a long and cautious 
line that completely encircled it — at a safe distance. 
After long hours of waiting they all went home. Yet 



122 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

no one was angry. They all seemed to think it part of 
the day's program. 

There is another side of Washington not so funny and 
tourists, even of the most sedate sort, who stop at the 
large hotels and who ride about in dignified motor-cars, 
do not see it. It is the side of heart-burnings. For in 
no other city of the land is the social code more sharply 
defined — and regulated. There are many cities in the 
country and we are telling of them in this book, who draw 
deep breaths upon exclusiveness. But in none of these 
save Washington do the folk who do obtain flaunt them- 
selves in the faces of those who do not. The fine old 
houses of Beacon street, in Boston, and of the Battery 
down at Charleston may draw themselves apart, but they 
do it silently and unostentatiously. In the very nature 
of things in Washington much modesty is quite out of the 
question. 

For here at our Federal capital we have a strange mix- 
ture of real democracy and false aristocracy as well as 
real — if there be any such thing as real aristocracy. 
The fact that almost every person in the town works, 
more or less directly, for Uncle Sam makes for the de- 
mocracy. And that self-same fact seems to fairly estab- 
lish the aristocracy — you can frankly call much of it 
snobbishness — of the place. To understand the whys 
and wherefores of this paradox one would need, himself, 
to be an employe of the government, of large or small de- 
gree. They are many and they are complicated. But an 
illustration or two will suffice to show what we mean : 

A rule, which no one nowadays seems very desirous of 
fathering, but nevertheless a rule of long standing, states 
that when a department chief enters an elevator in any of 
the department buildings it must carry him without other 
stops to his floor. The other passengers in the car must 
wait the time and the will of the chief, no matter how 



WASHINGTON 123 

urgent may be their errands or how short the time at 
their command. A gradual increase of this silly rule has 
made it include many assistants, sub-chiefs and assistants 
to sub-chiefs. Only the elevator man knows the rank at 
which a government employe becomes entitled to this 
peculiar privilege. But he does know, and woe be to 
that little stenographer who enters the Department of 

X at just three minutes of nine in the morning, with 

the expectation of being at her desk with that prompt- 
ness which the Federal government demands of the folk 
in its service. The second assistant to a second assist- 
ant of a sub-chief of a sub-division may have entered. 
The little stenographer's desk is upon the third floor ; the 
gentleman whose official title spelled out reaches almost 
across a sheet of note paper is upon the seventh. There 
are folk within the crowded elevator-car for the fourth 
and fifth and sixth floors as well. But they have neither 
title nor rank and the car shoots to the seventh floor for 
the benefit of the Mr. Assistant Somebody. If there is 
another Assistant Somebody there to ride down to the 
ground floor — and there frequently is — you can im- 
agine the consternation of the clerks. And yet it is part 
of the system under which they have to work when they 
work for that most democratic of employers — Uncle 
Samuel. 

The secretary of an important department who entered 
the cabinet with the present administration stayed very 
late at his office one evening, but found the elevator man 
awaiting him when he stepped out into the hallway of 
the deserted building. It was only a short flight of 
stairs to the street, and the secretary — it was Mr. 
Bryan — asked the man why he had not gone home. 

" My orders are to stay here, sir, until the secretary 
has gone home for the night," was the reply. 

It is hardly necessary to say that right there was one 
order in the State department that was immediately re- 



124 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

voked, while some twenty thousand clerks and stenog- 
raphers who form the working staff of official Washing- 
ton sent up little prayers of thanksgiving. These clerks 
and stenographers make up the every-day fiber of the 
town life. They go to work in the morning at nine — 
for a half-hour before that time you can see human 
streams of them pouring toward the larger departments 
— and they quit at half past four. The closing hour used 
to be five, but the clerks decided that they would have a 
shorter lunch-time and so they moved their afternoon 
session thirty minutes ahead. Half an hour is a short 
lunch-time and so official Washington carries its lunch 
to its desk, more or less cleverly disguised. The owners 
of popular priced downtown restaurants have long since 
given up in utter disgust. 

But official Washington does not care. Official Wash- 
ington ends its day at half-past four and official Wash- 
ington is such a power that matinees, afternoon lectures 
and concerts of any popular sort are rarely planned to 
begin before that hour. And on the hot summer after- 
noons of the Federal capital the wisdom of such early 
closing is hardly to be doubted. On such afternoons, 
matinee or concert, a cup of tea or a walk along the shop 
windows of F street are all forgotten. For beyond the 
heat of the city, within easy reach by its really wonder- 
ful transportation system, are playgrounds of infinite 
variety and joy. True it is that the really fine parts of 
Rock Creek Park are rather rigidly held for those folk 
who can aflford to ride in motor cars, but there is the 
river, innumerable picnic-grounds in every direction, fine 
bathing at Chesapeake beach, not far distant — and the 
canal. 

Of all these the old Chesapeake and Ohio canal is by 
far the most distinctive. And how the Washington folk 
do love that old waterway 1 What fun they do have out 
of it with their motor boats and their canoes. If that 



WASHINGTON 125 

old water-highway, almost losing its path in the stretches 
of thick wood and undergrowth, had been created as a 
plaything for the capital city, it could hardly have been 
better devised. The motor boats and the canoes set 
forth from Georgetown — on holidays and Sundays in 
great droves. They go all the way up to Great Falls — 
and even beyond — working their passage through the 
old locks, exchanging repartee with the lock-tenders, 
loafing under the shadows of the trees, drinking in the 
indolence of the summer days. 

But Shafer's Lock or Cabin John's Bridge is not the 
Chevy Chase Club and official Washington knows that. 
It reads in the daily papers of that other life, of the 
folk who wear white flannels and dawdle around great 
porches all day long ; hears rumors brought. Lord knows 
how, from the gossipy Metropolitan Club ; almost touches 
shoulders with its smart breakfasts and lunches and din- 
ners when it comes in and out of the confectioners' and 
the big hotels. But it is none the less apart, hopelessly 
and irrevocably apart. Uncle Sam may take the office 
folk of his capital and give them the assurance of a liveli- 
hood through long years, but that is all. He gives them 
no chance to step out of the comfortable rut into which 
they have been placed. The good positions, the positions 
that mean rank and title and entrance to the hallowed 
places, rarely come through promotions. They are the 
gifts of fortune, gifts even to strange folk from Cleveland 
or Madison or Stockton. They are not the reward of 
faithful service at an unknown desk. 

And so official Washington, as we have seen here, is 
quite helpless. The other official Washington — the of- 
ificial Washington of the society columns — little cares. 
It is not above noticing the twenty thousand, but it is 
mere notice and nothing more. And as for interest or 
graciousness or kind-heartedness — they are quite out of 



126 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

the question. Washington is being rebuilt, in both its 
physical and its social structure. The architects of its so- 
cial structure are not less capable than those folk who are 
working out marvels in steel and marble. These first 
see the Washington of tomorrow, modeled closely after 
the structures of European capitals. Already our newly 
created class of American idle rich is establishing its 
habitat along the lovely streets of our handsomest town. 
That is a beginning. In some of the departments they 
have begun to serve tea at four of an afternoon — just 
as they do on the terrace of the House of Commons. 
That is another beginning. We are starting. 

The structure of European capitals is largely built upon 
class distinctions. Washington is being builded close to 
its models. 

For ourselves, we prefer the touch of Europe as the 
architects work them in steel and in marble. A man who 
has been to Washington and who has not returned within 
the decade will be astonished to see the change already 
worked in its appearance. From the moment he steps 
across the threshold of the fine new station — itself a 
revelation after the old-time railroad terminals of the 
town — he will see transformation. Washington is still 
in growth. They are tearing down the ugly buildings 
and building upon their sites the beautiful, weaving in 
the almost gentle creations of the modern architects, a 
new city which after a little time will cease to be modeled 
upon Europe but which will serve, in itself, as a model 
capital for the entire world to follow. 



7 
THE CITY OF THE SEVEN HILLS 

YOU can compare Richmond with Rome if you will, 
with an allusion upon the side to her seven hills ; 
but, if you have even a remote desire for originality, you 
will not. Rather compare the old southern capital with 
a bit of rare lace or a stout bit of mahogany. Of the 
two we would prefer the mahogany, for Richmond is 
substantial, rather than diaphanous. And like some of 
the fine old tables in the dining-rooms of her great houses 
she has taken some hard knocks and in the long run come 
out of them rather well. She is scarred, but still beauti- 
ful. And she wears her scars, visible and invisible, both 
bravely and well.^ 

But if a man come down from the North with any 
idea of the histories of that war, which is now fifty years 
old and almost ready to be forgotten, too sharply in his 
memory, and so imagines that he is to see a Richmond 
of 1865, with grass growing in the streets, ruins every- 
where, mules and negroes in the streets, he is doomed to 
an awakening. There are still plenty of mules and ne- 
groes in the streets and probably will be until the end of 
time, but the Richmond of today boasts miles and miles 
of as fine modern smooth pavements as his motor car 
might ever wish to find. And as for ruins, bless you, 
Richmond has begun to tear down some of the buildings 
which she built after the war so as to get building-sites 
for her newest skyscrapers. 

Do not forget that there is a new spirit abroad in the 
South — and Virginia, in many ways the most poetic 

127 



128 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

and dramatic of all our states, has not lagged in it. There 
are Boards of Trade at Roanoke and Lynchburg that are 
not averse to sounding the praises of those lively manu- 
facturing towns of the up-country, and as for Norfolk — 
let any Norfolk man get hold of you and in two hours 
he will have almost convinced you that his town is going 
to be the greatest seaport along the North Atlantic — 
and that within two decades, sir. But this chapter is not 
written of Roanoke or Lynchburg or Norfolk. This is 
Richmond's chapter and in it to be writ the fact that the 
capital of Virginia has not lagged in enterprise or prog- 
ress behind any of the other cities of the state. In the 
transformation she has sacrificed few of her landmarks, 
none of that delightful personality that makes itself ap- 
parent to those who tarry for a little time within her 
gates. That makes it all the better. 

It is the spirit of the new South that is not only bring- 
ing such wonderful towns as Birmingham, to make a 
single instance, to the front, but is working the trans- 
formation of such staunch old settlements as Memphis 
or Atlanta — or Richmond. Not that Richmond is will- 
ing to forget the past. There is something about the 
Virginia spirit that seems incapable of death. There is 
something about the Virginian's loyalty to his native 
state, his blindness to her imperfections, almost every one 
of them the result of decades of civic poverty, that cannot 
escape the most calloused commercial soul that ever 
walked out of North or South. And there is something 
about this bringing up of spirit and of loyalty with the 
spirit of the new America that makes a combination well- 
nigh irresistible. 

Here, then, is the new South. The generation that 
liked to discuss the detail of Pickett's charge and the hor- 
rors of those days in the Wilderness is gone. The 
new generations are rather bored with such detail. The 
new generations are not less spirited, not less loyal than 



RICHMOND 129 

the old. But they are new. That, of itself, almost ex- 
plains the difference. Now see it in a little closer light. 

Volumes have been written of the loyalty of the old 
South. Richmond herself today presents more volumes, 
although unwritten, of that loyalty. You can read it in 
her streets, in her fine old square houses, in that stately 
building atop of Schokoe hill, which generations have 
known as the Capitol and which was for a little time the 
seat of government of a new nation. Within that Cap- 
itol stands a statue. It is the marble efifigy of a great 
Virginian, who was, himself, the first head of a new 
government. The guide-books call it the Houdini statue 
of Washington, and keen critics have long since asserted 
that it is not only the finest statue in the United States 
but one of the most notable art works of the world. It 
was known as such in France at the time of the Civil 
War. And hardly had that very dark page in our history 
been turned before the Louvre made overtures to Vir- 
ginia for the purchase of the Houdini statue. The matter 
of price was not definitely fixed. France, in the spend- 
thrift glories of the Second Empire, was willing to pay 
high for a new toy for her great gallery. 

Poor Virginia ! She was hard pressed those days for 
the necessities of life, to say nothing of its ordinary com- 
forts. Her pockets were empty. She was bankrupt. 
Her mouth must have watered a bit at thought of those 
hundreds of thousands of French francs. But she stood 
firm, and if you know Virginia at all, you will say " of 
course she stood firm." A Southern gentleman would al- 
most repudiate his financial obligations before he would 
sell one of the choice possessions of his families. There 
are great plantation houses still standing in the Old Do- 
minion, which were spared the torch of war by the mercy 
of God, and whose walls hold aloft the handiwork of the 
finest painters of England, in the seventeenth and eight- 
eenth centuries; rare portraits of the masters and mis- 



130 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

tresses of those old houses. In them, too, are furniture 
and silver whose real value is hardly to be computed, not 
even by the screw of a dealer in antiques. The folk in 
these old houses may be poor — if they come of the oldest 
Virginia stock they very likely are. They stand bravely, 
though, to the traditions of their hospitality, even though 
they wonder if the bacon is going to last and if it is safe 
for the brood to kill another chicken. But they would 
close their kitchen and live on berries and on herbs be- 
fore they would part with even the humblest piece of 
silver or of furniture ; while if a dealer should come down 
from Washington or New York and make an offer, no 
matter how generous, for one of the paintings, he would 
probably be put ofif the place. 

Family means much to these Virginians. If you do 
not believe this go to Richmond, stop in one of its fine 
houses and make your host take you to one of the dances 
for which the city is famed. Almost any dance will do 
and from the beginning you will be charmed. The minor 
appointments will approach perfection, and you will find 
the men and women of the city worthy of its best tradi- 
tions. Some places may disappoint in their well-adver- 
tised charm but the girls of Richmond never disappoint. 
Here is one of them. She gets you in a quiet corner of 
the place, meets a friend over there, and a conversation 
somewhat after this fashion gets under way : 

" Miss Rhett, allow me to introduce my friend, Mr. 
Blinkins, of New York." 

You bow low and ask Miss Rhett if by any chance 
she is related to the Rhetts of Charleston. 

" Only distantly. My people are all Virginians. The 
Charleston Rhetts are quite another branch. My grand- 
father's brother married a Miss Morris, from Savannah 
and the Charleston Rhetts all come from them. If my 
papa were only here he would explain." 

You say that you understand and murmur something 



RICHMOND 131 

about having met a Richard Henry Rhett at the old Colo- 
nial town of Williamsburgh a few years ago when you 
were down for the Jamestown exposition. 

" He was a Petersburgh Rhett," the young lady ex- 
plains, " son of a cousin of my father. He married Miss 
Virginia Tredegar last year." 

You remember hearing of a Miss Virginia Tredegar 
of Roanoke, and you slip out that fact. But this is Miss 
Virginia Tredegar of Weldon and a cousin of Miss Vir- 
ginia Tredegar of Roanoke. Miss Virginia Tredegar of 
Weldon — now Mrs. Richard Henry Rhett, of course, is 
a delightful girl. The young lady who has you in the 
corner assures you that — and she, herself, is not lacking 
in charms. Mrs. Rhett was a sponsor for the state for 
several years, and you vaguely wonder just what that 
may mean as you have visions of large floats lumbering 
along in street parades,, with really lovely girls in white 
standing upon them. And you also have visions of the 
Miss Virginia Tredegar, of Weldon, sitting in the other 
days upon the door-steps of an old red and white Co- 
lonial house, which faces a hot little open square, visions 
of her accomplishments and her beauty; of her ability 
to ride the roughest horse in the county, to dance seven 
hours without seeming fatigue, of the jealous beaux who 
come flocking to her feet. You find yourself idly speak- 
ing of these visions to your companion. She laughs. 

" I've just the right girl for you," she says, " and she 
is here in this ball-room. She is all these things — and 
some more; the rightest, smartest girl in all our state — 
Miss Virginia Bauregard, daughter of Mr. Calhoun 
Bauregard, of Belle Manor in King and Queen county." 

Apparently they are all named Virginia in Richmond, 
seemingly three-quarters of these girls who live in the 
nicer parts of the town are thus to bespeak through their 
lives the aflfectionate loyalty of their parents to the Old 
Dominion. 



132 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

All these folk come quite easily to the transformation 
that has come over the South within the decade, since 
she ceased to grieve over a past that could never be 
brought back and overcome. The young boys and the 
young girls turn readily from fine horses to fine motor 
cars, the coming of imported customs causes few shocks, 
it is even rumored that the newest of the new dances 
have invaded the sober drawing-rooms of the place. But 
the New South is kind to Richmond. She does not seek 
to eliminate the Old South. And so the old customs and 
the old traditions run side by side with the new. And 
even the old families seem to soften and many times to 
welcome the new. 

If you wish to see the real Old South in Richmond go 
out to Hollywood cemetery, which is perhaps the great- 
est of all its landmarks. It is easy of access, very beau- 
tiful, although not in the elaborate and immaculate fash- 
ion of Greenwood, at Brooklyn, or Mount Auburn, just 
outside of Boston. But where man has fallen short at 
Hollywood, Nature has more than done her part. She 
rounded the lovely hills upon which Richmond might 
place the treasure-chest of her memories, and then she 
swept the finest of all Virginia rivers — the James — by 
those hills. Man did the rest. It was man who created 
the roadways and who placed the monuments. And not 
the least interesting of these is the strange tomb of Presi- 
dent James Monroe, an imposing bronze structure, in 
these days reminding one of an enlarged bird-cage. It 
is interesting perhaps because nearby there is another 
grave — the grave of still another man who came to the 
highest office of the American people. The second grave 
is marked by a small headstone, scarcely large enough to 
accommodate its two words : " John Tyler." 

But more interesting than these older monuments is 
the group that stands alone, at the far corner of the ceme- 



RICHMOND 133 

tery and atop of one of those little hillocks close beside 
the river. The head of that family is buried beneath his 
effigy. It is the grave of Jefferson Davis, who stands 
facing the city, as if he still dreamed of the days that 
might have been but never were. And close beside is 
the grave of his little girl, " The Daughter of Confed- 
eracy." When she died, only a few years since, the 
South felt that the last of the living links that tied it with 
the days when men fought and died for the Lost Cause 
had been severed. It was then that it set to work to 
build the new out of the old. 

Nowadays the Old South does not come publicly into 
the streets of Richmond — save on that memorable occa- 
sion in the spring of 1907 when a feeble trail of aging 
men — all that remained of a great gray army — limped 
down a triumphant path through the heart of the town. 
The Old South sits in her dead cities, and perhaps that 
is the reason why the Southerner so quickly takes the 
stranger within his gates to the cemetery. It is his 
apologies for thirty or forty years lost in the march of 
progress. And it is an apology that no man of breadth 
or generosity can refuse to accept. 

Here, then, is the new Richmond, riding stoutly upon 
her great hills and shooting the tendrils of her growth 
in every direction. For she is growing, rapidly and hand- 
somely. Her new buildings — her wonderful cathedral, 
her superb modern hotels, the fine homes multiplying 
out by the Lee statue — what self-respecting southern 
town does not have a Lee statue — all bespeak the quality 
of her growth. But her new buildings cannot easily sur- 
pass the old. It was rare good judgment in an American 
town for her to refrain from tearing down or even 
" modernizing " that Greek temple that stands atop of 
Schokoe hill and which generations have known as the 
Capitol. The two flanking wings which were made ab- 



134 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

solutely necessary by the awakening of the Old Dominion 
have not robbed the older portion of the building of one 
whit of its charm. 

It typifies the Old South and the New South, come to 
stand beside one another. In other days Virginia was 
proud of her capital, it was with no small pride that she 
thrust it ahead when a seat of government was to be 
chosen for the Confederacy, that for a little time she saw 
it take its stormy place among the nations of the world. 
In these days Virginia may still be proud of her capital 
town — it is still a seat of government quite worthy of 
a state of pride and of traditions. 



8 

WHERE ROMANCE AND COURTESY DO NOT 
FORGET 

^4"\7'OU are not going to write your book and leave out 
j[ Charleston ? " said the Man who Makes Maga- 
zines. 

We hesitated at acknowledging the truth. In some 
way or other Charleston had escaped us upon our travels. 
The Magazine Maker read our answer before we could 
gain strength to make it. 

" Well, you can't afford to miss that town," he said 
conclusively. " It's great stuff." 

" Great stuff? " we ventured. 

" If you are looking into the personality of American 
cities you must include Charleston. She has more per- 
sonality than any of the other old Colonial towns — save 
Boston. She's personality personified, old age glorified, 
charm and sweetness magnified — the flavor of the past 
hangs in every one of her old houses and her narrow 
streets. You cannot pass by Charleston." 

After that we went over to a railroad ticket office in 
Fifth avenue and purchased a round-trip ticket to the 
metropolis of South Carolina. And a week later we 
were on a southbound train, running like mad across the 
Jersey meadows. Five days in Charleston ! It seemed 
almost sacrilege. Five miserable days in the town which 
the Maker of Magazines averred fairly oozed personality. 
But five days were better than no days at all — and 
Charleston must be included in this book. 

The greater part of one day — crossing New Jersey, 
Pennsylvania, the up-stretched head of little Delaware, 

135 



136 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

Maryland — finally the Old Dominion and the real South. 
A day spent behind the glass of the car window — the 
brisk and busy Jersey towns, the Delaware easily crossed ; 
Philadelphia, with her great outspreading of suburbs; 
Wilmington ; a short cut through the basements of Balti- 
more; the afternoon light dying on the superb dome 
of the Washington Capitol — after that the Potomac. 
Then a few evening hours through Virginia, the south- 
ern accent growing more pronounced, the very air softer, 
the negroes more prevalent, the porter of our car con- 
tinually more deferential, more polite. After that a few 
hours of oblivion, even in the clattering Pullman which, 
after the fashion of all these tremendously safe new steel 
cars, was a bit chilly and a bit noisy. 

In the morning a low and unkempt land, the railroad 
trestling its way over morass and swamp and bayou on 
long timber structures and many times threading sluggish 
yellow southern rivers by larger bridges. Between 
these a sandy mainland — thick forests of pine with in- 
creasing numbers of live-oaks holding soft moss aloft 
• — at last the outskirts of a town. Other folk might 
gather their luggage together, the vision of a distant 
place with its white spires, the soft gray fog that tells 
of the proximity of the open sea blowing in upon them, 
held us at the window pane. A river showed itself in 
the distance to the one side of the train, with mast-heads 
dominating its shores ; another, lined with " factories 
stretched upon the other side. After these, the streets 
of the town, a trolley car stalled impatient to let our train 
pass — low streets and mean streets of an unmistakable 
negro quarter, the broad shed of a sizable railroad station 
showing at the right. 

" Charleston, sah," said the porter. Remember now 
that he had been a haughty creature in New York and 
Philadelphia, ebon dignity in Baltimore and in Wash- 



CHARLESTON 137 

ington. Now he was docility itself, a courtesy hardly to 
be measured by the mere expectation of gratuity. 

The first glimpse of Charleston a rough paved street 
— our hotel 'bus finding itself with almost dangerous 
celerity in front of trolley cars. That unimportant way 
led into another broad highway of the town and seemingly 
entitled to distinction. 

" Meeting street," said our driver. " And I can tell 
you that Charleston is right proud of it, sir," he added. 

Charleston has good cause to be proud of its main 
highway, with the lovely old houses along it rising out 
of blooming gardens, like fine ladies from their ball 
gowns ; at its upper end the big open square and the ad- 
jacent Citadel — pouring out its gray-uniformed boys to 
drill just as their daddies and their grand-daddies drilled 
there before them — the charms of St. Michael's, and 
the never-to-be-forgotten Battery at the foot of the 
street. 

We sped down it and drew up at a snow-white hotel 
which in its immaculate coat might have sprung up yes- 
terday, were it not for the stately row of great pillars, 
three stories in height, with which it faced the street. 
They do not build hotels that way nowadays — more's 
the pity. For when the Charleston Hotel was builded it 
entered a distinguished brotherhood — the Tremont in 
Boston, the Astor and the St. Nicholas in New York, 
Willard's in Washington, the Monongahela at Pittsburgh, 
and the St. Charles in New Orleans were among its con- 
temporaries. It was worthy to be ranked with the best 
of these — a hotel at which the great planters of the 
Carolinas and of Georgia could feel that the best had 
been created for them within the very heart of their 
favorite city. 

We pushed our way into the heart of the generous 
office of the hotel, thronged with the folk who had 



138 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

crowded into Charleston — followers of the races, just 
then holding sway upon the outskirts of the town, tour- 
ists from the North, Carolinans who will never lose the 
habit of going to Charleston as long as Charleston exists. 
In due time a brisk and bustling hotel clerk — he was 
an importation, plainly, none of your courteous, ease- 
taking Southerners — had placed us in a room big enough 
for the holding of a reception. From the shutters of the 
room we could look down into Meeting street — into the 
charred remnants of a store that had been burned long 
before and the debris never removed. When we threw 
up the window sash we could thrust our heads out and 
see, a little way down the street, the most distinctive and 
the most revered of all Charleston's landmarks — the 
belfried spire of St. Michael's. As we leaned from that 
window the bells of St. Michael's spoke the quarter-hour, 
just as they have been speaking quarter-hours close upon 
a century and a half. 

We had been given the first taste of the potent charm 
of a most distinctive southern town. 

". . . The most appealing, the most lovely, the most 
wistful town in America ; whose visible sadness and dis- 
tinction seem almost to speak audibly, speak in the sound 
of the quiet waves that ripple round her southern front, 
speak in the church-bells on Sunday morning and breathe 
not only in the soft salt air, but in the perfume of every 
gentle, old-fashioned rose that blooms behind the high 
garden walls of falling mellow-tinted plaster ; King's Port 
the retrospective. King's Port the belated, who from her 
pensive porticoes looks over her two rivers to the marshes 
and the trees beyond, the live-oaks veiled in gray moss, 
brooding with memories. Were she my city how I 
should love her. . . ." 

So wrote Owen Wister of the city that he came to 
know so well. You can read Charleston in Lady Balti- 



CHARLESTON 139 

more each time he speaks of " King's Port " and read 
correctly. For it was in Charleston he spun his romance 
of the last stronghold of old manners, old families, old 
traditions and old affections. In no other city of the land 
might he have laid such a story. For no other city of 
the land bears the memory of tragedy so plaintively, so 
uncomplainingly as the old town that occupies the flat 
peninsula between the Cooper and the Ashley rivers at 
the very gateway of South Carolina. Like a scarred 
man, Charleston will bear the visible traces of her great 
disaster until the end of her days. And each of them, 
like the scars of Richmond, makes her but the more 
potent in her charm. 

Up one street and down another — fascinating path- 
ways, every blessed one of them. Meeting and King and 
Queen and Legare and Calhoun and Tradd — with their 
high, narrow-ended houses rising right from the side- 
walks and stretching, with their generous spirit of hos- 
pitality, inward, beside gardens that blossom as only a 
southern garden can bloom — with jessamine and nar- 
cissus and oleander and japonica. Galleries give to these 
fragrant gardens. Only Charleston, unique among her 
sisters of the Southland, does not call them galleries. 
She calls them piazzas, with the accent strong upon the 
" pi." 

The gardens themselves are more than a little Eng- 
lish, speaking clearly something of the old-time English 
spirit of the town, which has its most visible other ex- 
pression in the stolid Georgian architecture of its older 
public buildings and churches. And some of the older 
folk, defying the Charleston convention of four o'clock 
dinner, will take tea in the softness of the late afternoon. 
Local tradition still relates how, in other days, a certain 
distinguished and elderly citizen, possessing neither gar- 
den nor gallery with his house, was wont to have a table 
and chair placed upon the sidewalk and there take his 



140 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

tea of a late afternoon. And the Charleston of that 
other day walked upon the far side of the street rather 
than disturb the gentleman ! 

Nor is all that spirit quite gone in the Charleston of 
today. The older negroes will touch their hats, if not 
remove them, when you glance at them. They will step 
into the gutter when you pass them upon the narrow 
sidewalks of the narrow streets. They came of a gen- 
eration that made more than the small distinction of sep- 
arate schools and separate places in the railroad cars 
between white and black. But they are rapidly disap- 
pearing from the streets of the old city. Those younger 
negroes who drive the clumsy two-wheeled carts in town 
and out over the rough-paved streets have learned no 
good manners. And when the burly negresses who 
amble up the sidewalks balancing huge trays of crabs or 
fresh fruits or baked stuffs smile at you, theirs is the 
smile of insolence. Fifty years of the Fifteenth Amend- 
ment have done their work — any older resident of 
Charleston will tell you that, and thank God for the 
inborn courtesy that keeps him from profanity with the 
telling. 

But if oncoming years have worked great changes in 
the manner of the race which continues to be of numer- 
ical importance in the seaport city, it will take more than 
one or two or three or even four generations to work 
great changes in the manners of the well-born white- 
skinned folk who have ruled Charleston through the 
years by wit, diplomacy, the keen force of intellect more 
than even the force of arms. And, as the city now runs 
its course, it will take far more years for her to change 
her outward guise. 

For Charleston does not change easily. She continues 
to be a city of yellow and of white. Other southern 
towns may claim distinction because of their red-walled 
brick houses with their white porticos, but the reds of 



CHARLESTON 141 

Charleston long since softened, the green moss and the 
lichens have grown up and over the old walls — exquisite 
bits of masonry, every one of them and the products of 
an age when every artisan was an artist and full master 
of his craft. The distinctive color of the town shades 
from a creamy yellow to a grayish white. The houses, 
as we have already said, stand with their ends to the 
streets, with flanking walls hiding the rich gardens from 
the sidewalk, save for a few seductive glimpses through 
the well-wrought grillings of an occasional gateway. 
Charleston does not parade herself. The closed windows 
of her houses seem to close jealously against the Present 
as if they sought to hold within their great rooms the 
Past and all of the glories that were of it. 

Builded of brick in most instances, the larger houses 
and the two most famous churches, as well, were long 
ago given plaster coatings that they might conform to 
the yellow-white dominating color of the town. Inva- 
riably very high and almost invariably very narrow and 
bald of cornice, these old houses are roofed with heavy 
corrugated tiles, once red but now softened by Time into 
a dozen different tints. If there is another town in the 
land where roof-tile has been used to such picturesque 
advantage we have failed to see it. It gives to Charles- 
ton an incredibly foreign aspect. If it were not for the 
Georgian churches and the older public buildings one 
might see in the plaster walls and the red-tiled roofs a 
distinct trace of the French or the Italian. Charleston 
herself is not unlike many towns that sleep in the south 
of France or the north of Italy. It only takes the hordes 
of negroes upon her streets to dispel the illusion that one 
is again treading some corner of the Old World. 

Perhaps the best way that the casual visitor to Charles- 
ton can appreciate these negroes is in their street calls 
— if he has not been up too late upon the preceding night. 
For long before seven o'clock the brigades of itinerant 



142 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

merchants are on their ways through the narrow streets 
of the old town. From the soft, deep marshlands behind 
it and the crevices and the turnings of the sea and all its 
inlets come the finest and the rarest of delicacies, and 
these food-stuffs find their way quite naturally to the 
street vendors. Porgies and garden truck, lobsters and 
shrimp and crab, home-made candies — the list runs to 
great length. 

You turn restlessly in your bed at dawn. Something 
has stolen that last precious " forty winks " away from 
you. If you could find that something. . . . Hark. 
There it is : Through the crispness of morning air it 
comes musically to your ears : 

"Swimpy waw, waw. . . . Swimpy waw, waw." 
And from another direction comes a slowly modu- 
lated : 

" Waw cwab. Waw Cwab. Waw Cwa-a-a-b." 
A sharp staccato breaks in upon both of these. 
" She cwaib, she cwaib, she cwaib," it calls, and you 
know that there is a preference in crabs. Up one street 
and down another, male vendors, female vendors old and 
young, but generally old. If any one wishes to sleep in 
Charleston — well, he simply cannot sleep late in Charles- 
ton. To dream of rest while: "Sweet Pete ate her! 
Sweet Pete ate her ! " comes rolling up to your window 
in tones as dulcet as ever rang within an opera house 
would be outrageous. It is a merry jangle to open the 
day, quite as remote from euphony and as thoroughly 
delightful as the early morning church-bells of Montreal 
or of Quebec. By breakfast time it is quite gone — 
unless you wish to include the coal-black mammy who 
chants : " Come chilluns, get yer monkey meat — mon- 
key meat." And that old relic of ante-bellum days who 
rides a two-wheel cart in all the narrow lanes and per- 
meates the very air with his melanchholy : " Char — 
coal. Char — coal." 



CHARLESTON 143 

If you inquire as to " monkey meat," your Charles- 
tonian will tell you of the delectable mixture of cocoa- 
nut and molasses candy which is to the younger gener- 
ation of the town as the incomparable Lady Baltimore 
cake is to the older. 

The churches of Charleston are her greatest charm. 
And of these, boldly asserting its prerogative by rising 
from the busiest corner of the town, the most famed is 
St. Michael's. St. Michael's is the lion of Charleston. 
Since 1764 she has stood there at Broad and Meeting 
streets and demanded the obeisance of the port — gladly 
rendered her. She has stood to her corner through sun- 
shine and through storm — through the glad busy years 
when Charleston dreamed of power and of surpassing 
those upstart northern towns — New York and Boston 
— through the bitterness of two great wars and the 
dangers of a third and lesser one, through four cyclones 
and the most devastating earthquake that the Atlantic 
coast has ever known — through all these perils this 
solidly wrought Temple of the Lord has come safely. 
She is the real old lady of Charleston, and when she 
speaks the folk within the town stand at attention. The 
soft, sweet bells of St. Michael's are the tenderest mem- 
ory that can come to a resident of the city when he is 
gone a long way from her streets and her lovely homes. 
And when the bells of St. Michael's have been stilled 
it has been a stilled Charleston. 

For there have been times when the bells of St. 
Michael's have not spoken down from their high white 
belfry. In fact, they have crossed the Atlantic not less 
than five times. Cast in the middle of the eighteenth 
century in an English bell-foundry, they had hardly been 
hung within their belfry before the Revolution broke 
out — broke out at Charleston just as did the Civil War. 
Before the British left the city for the last time the com- 



144 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

manding officer had claimed the eight bells as his " per- 
quisite " and had shipped them back to England. An 
indignant American town demanded their return. Even 
the British commanding officer at New York, Sir Guy 
Carleton, did not have it within his heart to countenance 
such sacrilege. The bells had been already sold in Eng- 
land upon a speculation, but the purchaser was compelled 
to return them. The people of the Colonial town drew 
them from the wharf to St. Michael's in formal proces- 
sion — the swinging of them anew was hardly a less 
ceremonial. The first notes they sang were like unto a 
religious rite. And for seventy years the soft voice of 
the old lady of Charleston spoke down to her children 
— at the quarters of the hours. 

After those seventy years more war — ugly guns that 
are remembered with a shudder as " Swamp Angels," 
pouring shells into a proud, rebellious, hungry, unrelent- 
ing city, the stout white tower of St. Michael's a fair and 
shining mark for northern gunners. Charleston sud- 
denly realized the danger to the voice of her pet old 
lady. There were few able-bodied men in the town — 
all of them were fighting within the Confederate lines — 
but they unshipped those precious bells and sent them 
up-state — to Columbia, the state capitol, far inland and 
safe from the possibility of sea marauders. They were 
hidden there but not so well but that Sherman's men in 
the march to the sea found them and by an act of van- 
dalism which the South today believes far greater than 
that of an angered British army, completely destroyed 
them. 

When peace came again Charleston — bruised and bat- 
tered and bleeding Charleston, with the scars that time 
could never heal — gave first thought to her bells — a 
mere mass of molten and broken metal. There was a 
single chance and Charleston took it. That chance won. 
The English are a conservative nation — to put it lightly. 



CHARLESTON 145 

The old bell-foundry still had the molds in which the 
chime was first cast — a hundred years before. Once 
again those old casts were wheeled into the foundry and 
from them came again the bells of St. Michael's, the 
sweetness of their tones unchanged. The town had re- 
gained its voice. 

If we have dwelt at length upon the bells of St. 
Michael's it is because they speak so truly the real per- 
sonality of the town. The church itself is not of less 
interest. And the churchyard that surrounds it upon 
two sides is as filled with charm and rare flavor as any 
churchyard we have ever seen. Under its old stones 
sleep forever the folk who lived in Charleston in the days 
of her glories — Pringles and Pinckneys ; Moultries ; 
those three famous " R's" of South Carolina — Rutledge 
and Ravenel and Rhett — the names within that silent 
place read like the roster of the colonial aristocracy. 
Above the silent markers, the moldering and crumbling 
tombs, rises a riot of God's growing things ; in the soft 
southern air a perpetual tribute to the dead — narcissus, 
oleander, jessamine, the stately Pride of India bush. 
And on the morning that we first strolled into the shady, 
quiet place a red-bird — the famous Cardinal Crossbeak 
of the south — sang to us from his perch in a magnolia 
tree. Twenty-four hours before and we had crossed the 
Pludson river at New York in a driving and a blizzard- 
threatening snowstorm. 

The greatest charm of St. Michael's does not rest alone 
within the little paths of her high-walled churchyard. 
Within the sturdy church, in the serenity of her sanc- 
tuary, in the great square box-pews where sat so many 
years the elect of Charleston, of the very Southland you 
might say ; in the high-set pulpit and the unusual desk 
underneath where sat the old time " dark " to read the 
responses and the notices ; even the stately pew, set aside 
from all the others, in which General Washington sat on 



146 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

the occasion of a memorable visit to the South Carolina 
town, is the fullness of her charm. If you are given 
imagination, you can see the brown and white church 
filled as in the old days with the planters and their fam- 
ilies — generation after generation of them, coming first 
to the church, being baptized in its dove-crowned font 
at the door and then, years later, being carried out of 
that center aisle for the final time. You can see the 
congregations of half a century ago, faces white and set 
and determined. You can see one memorable congre- 
gation, as it hears the crash of a Federal shell against 
the heavy tower, and then listen to the gentle rector fin- 
ishing the implication of the Litany before he dismisses 
his little flock. 

Dear old St. Michael's ! The years — the sunny years 
and the tragic years — set lightly upon her. When war 
and storm have wrecked her, it has been her children and 
her children's children who have arisen to help wipe 
away the scars. In a memorable storm of August, 1885, 
the great wooden ball at the top of her weather vane, 
one hundred and eighty-five feet above the street was 
sent hurtling down to the ground. They will show you 
the dent it made in the pavement flag. It was quickly 
replaced. But within a year worse than cyclone was 
upon St. Alichael's — the memorable earthquake which 
sank the great tower eight inches deeper into the earth. 
And only last year another of the fearful summer storms 
that come now and then upon the place wreaked fearful 
damage upon the old church. Yet St. Michael's has been 
patiently repaired each time ; she still towers above these 
disasters — as her quaint weather-vane towers above the 
town, itself. 

After St. Michael's, St. Philip's — although St. Philip's 
is the real mother church of all Charleston. The old 




St. Michael's churchyard, Charleston — a veritable roster 
of the Colonial Elect 



CHARLESTON 147 

town does not pin her faith upon a single lion. The first 
time we found our way down Meeting street, we saw 
a delicate and belfried spire rising above the greenery 
of the trees in a distant churchyard. The staunch church 
from which that spire springs was well worth our at- 
tention. And so we found our way to St. Philip's. We 
turned down Broad street from St. Michael's — to com- 
mercial Charleston as its namesake street is to New York 
— then at the little red-brick library, housed in the same 
place for nearly three-quarters of a century, we turned 
again. The south portico of St. Philip's, tall-columned, 
dignified almost beyond expression, confronted us. And 
a moment later we found ourselves within a churchyard 
that ranked in interest and importance with that of St. 
Michael's, itself. 

A shambling negro care-taker came toward us. He 
had been engaged in helping some children get a kitten 
down from the upper branches of a tree in the old church- 
yard. With the intuition of his kind, he saw in us, 
strangers — manifest possibilities. He devoted himself 
to attention upon us. And he sounded the praises of 
his own exhibit in no mild key. 

" Yessa — de fines' church in all de South," he said, as 
he swung the great door of St. Philip's wide open. He 
seemed to feel, also intuitively, that we had just come 
from the rival exhibit. And we felt more than a slight 
suspicion of jealousy within the air. 

The negro was right. St. Philip's, Charleston, is more 
than the finest church in all the South. Perhaps it is 
not too much to say that it is the most beautiful church 
in all the land. Copied, rather broadly, from St. Mar- 
tins-in-the-Fields, London, it thrusts itself out into the 
street, indeed, makes the highway take a broad double 
curve in order to pass its front portico. But St. Philip's 
commits the fearful Charleston sin of being new. The 



148 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

present structure has only been thrusting its nose out into 
Church street for a mere eighty years. The old St. 
Philip's was burned — one of the most fearful of all 
Charleston tragedies — in 1834. 

" Yessa — a big fire dat," said the caretaker. " They 
gib two slaves dere freedom for helpin' at dat fire." 

But history only records the fact that the efforts to 
put out the fire in St. Philip's were both feeble and futile. 
It does tell, however, of a negro sailor who, when the 
old church was threatened by fire on an earlier occasion, 
climbed to the tower and tore the blazing shingles from 
it and was afterward presented with his freedom and a 
fishing-boat and outfit. Does that sound familiar? It 
was in our Third Reader — some lurid verses but, alas 
for the accuracy that should be imparted to the grow- 
ing mind — it was St. Michael's to whom that wide- 
spread glory was given. St. Michael's of the heart of the 
town once again. No wonder that St. Philip's of the 
side-street grieves in silence. 

In silence, you say. How about the bells of St. 
Philip's? 

If you are from the North it were better that you did 
not ask that question. The bells of St. Philip's, in their 
day hardly less famous than those of the sister church, 
went into cannon for the defense of the South. When 
the last of the copper gutters had been torn from the 
barren houses, when the final iron kettle had gone to the 
gun-foundry, the supreme sacrifice was made. The bells 
rang merrily on a Sabbath morn and for a final time. 
The next day they were unshipping them and one of the 
silvery voices of Charleston was forever hushed. 

But St. Philip's has her own distinctions. In the first 
place, her own graveyard is a roll-call of the Colonial 
elect. Within it stands the humble tomb of him who was 
the greatest of all the great men of South Carolina — 
John C. Calhoun — while nightly from her high-lifted 



CHARLESTON 149 

spire there gleams the only light that ever a church-tower 
sent far out to sea for the guidance of the mariner. The 
ship-pilots along the North Atlantic very v^^ell know 
when they pass Charleston light-ship, the range between 
Fort Sumter and St. Philip's spire shows a clear fairway 
all the distance up to the wharves of Charleston. 

There are other great churches of Charleston — some 
of them very handsome and with a deal of local history 
clustering about them, but perhaps none of these can 
approach in interest the Huguenot edifice at the corner 
of Queen and Church streets. It is a little church, mod- 
estly disdaining such a worldly thing as a spire, in a 
crumbling churchyard whose tombstones have their in- 
scriptions written in French. A few folk find their way 
to it on Sunday mornings and there they listen atten- 
tively to its scholarly blind preacher, for sixty years the 
leader of his little fiock. But this little chapel is the 
sole fllame of a famous old faith, which still burns, albeit 
ever so faintly, in the blackness and the shadow of the 
New World. 

That is the real Charleston — the unexpected confront- 
ing you at almost every turn of its quiet streets : here 
across from the shrine of the Huguenots a ruinous build- 
ing through which white and negro children play together 
democratically and at will, and which in its day was the 
Planters' Hotel and a hostelry to be reckoned with ; down 
another byway a tiny remnant of the city's one-time wall 
in the form of a powder magazine ; over in Meeting 
street the attenuated market with a Greek temple of a 
hall set upon one end and the place where they sold the 
slaves still pointed out to folk from the North ; farther 
down on Meeting street the hall of the South Carolina 
Society, a really exquisite aged building wherein that 
distinguished old-time organization together with its still 
older brother, the St. Andrews, still dines on an ap- 



150 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

pointed day each month and whose poHshed ballroom 
floor has felt the light dance-falls of the St. Cecilias. 

" The St. Cecilia Society ? " you interrupt ; " why, I've 
heard of that." 

Of course you have. For the St. Cecilia typifies 
Charleston — the social life of the place, which is all 
there is left to it since her monumental tragedy of half 
a century ago. In Charleston there is no middle ground. 

You are either recognized socially — or else you are 
not. And the St. Cecilia Society is the sharply-drawn 
dividing point. Established somewhere before the be- 
ginning of the Revolution it has dominated Charleston 
society these many years. Invitations to its three balls 
each year are eagerly sought by all the feminine folk 
within the town. And the privilege of being invited to 
these formal affairs is never to be scorned — more often 
it is the cause of many heart-burnings. 

No one thing shows Charleston the more clearly than 
the fact that on the following morning you may search 
the columns of the venerable News and Courier almost 
in vain for a notice of the St. Cecilia ball. In any other 
town an event of such importance would be a task indeed 
for the society editor and all of her sub-editresses. If 
there was not a flashlight photograph there would be the 
description of the frocks — a list of the out-of-town 
guests at any rate. Charleston society does not concede 
a single one of these things. And the most the News 
and Courier ever prints is " The ball of the St. Cecilia 
Society was held last evening at Hibernian Hall," or a 
two-line notice of similar purport. 

Charleston society concedes little or nothing — not 
even these new-fashioned meal hours of the upstart 
Northern towns. In Charleston a meal each four hours 
— breakfast at eight, a light lunch at sharp noon, dinner 
at four, supper again at eight. These hours were good 
enough for other days — ergo, they are good enough for 



CHARLESTON 151 

these. And from eleven to two and again from five to 
seven-thirty remain the smart calling hours among the 
elect of the place. Those great houses do not yield read- 
ily to the Present. 

Charleston society is never democratic — no matter 
how Charleston politics may run. Its great houses, be- 
hind the exclusion of those high and forbidding walls, are 
tightly closed to such strangers as come without the right 
marks of identification. From without you may breathe 
the hints of old mahogany, of fine silver and china, of 
impeccable linen, of well-trained servants, but your imag- 
ination must meet the every test as to the details. Gen- 
tility does not flaunt herself. And if the younger girls 
of Charleston society do drive their motor cars pleasant 
mornings through the crowded shopping district of King 
street, that does not mean that Charleston — the Charles- 
ton of the barouche and the closed coupe — will ever 
approve. 

On the April day half a century ago that the first gun 
blazed defiantly from Fort Sumter and opened a page of 
history that bade fair to alter the very course of things, 
Prosperity slipped out of Charleston. Gentility, Cour- 
age, Romance alone remained. Prosperity with her giant 
steamships and her long railroad trains never returned. 
The great docks along the front of the splendid harbor 
stand unused, the warehouses upon them molder. A 
brisk Texas town upon a sand-spit — Galveston — boasts 
that she is the second ocean-port of America, with the 
hundreds of thousands of Texas acres turned from graz- 
ing ranges into cotton-field, just behind her. New Or- 
leans is the south gate of the Middle West that has come 
into existence, since Charleston faced her greatest of 
tragedies. And the docks along her waterfront grow 
rusty with disuse. 

She lives in her yesterdays of triumphs. Tell her that 



152 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

they have builded a tower in New York that is fifty-five 
stories in height, and she will reply that you can still see 
the house in Church street where President Washington 
w^as entertained in royal fashion by her citizens ; hint to 
her of the great canal to the south, and she will ask you 
if you remember how the blockade runners slipped night 
after night through the tight chain that the Federal gun- 
boats drew across the entrance of her harbor for four 
long years ; bespeak into her ears the social glories of 
the great hotels and the opera of New York, and she will 
tell you of the gentle French and English blood that went 
into the making of her first families. Charleston has lost 
nothing. For what is Prosperity, she may ask you, but 
a dollar-mark? Romance and Courtesy are without price. 
Romance and Courtesy still walk in her streets, in the 
hot and lazy summer days, in the brilliancy of the south- 
ern moon beating down upon her graceful guarding 
spires, in the thunder of the storm and the soft gray 
blankets of the ocean mantling her houses and her gar- 
dens. And Romance and Courtesy do not forget. 



9 
ROCHESTER — AND HER NEIGHBORS 

THE three great cities of western New York — 
Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo — are Hke jewels to 
the famous railroad along which they are strung, and 
effectively they serve to offset the great metropolitan 
district at the east end of the state. They have many 
things in common and yet they are not in the least alike. 
Their growth has been due to virtually a common cause ; 
the development of transportation facilities across New 
York state ; and yet their personality is as varied as that 
of three sisters ; lovely but different. 

Of the three, Rochester is the most distinctive ; one of 
the most distinctive of all. our American towns and hence 
chosen as the chief subject for this chapter. But Buffalo 
is the largest, and Syracuse the most ingenious, so 
they are not to be ignored. Rochester is conservative. 
Rochester proves her conservatism by her smart clubs, 
and the general cultivation of her inhabitants. Certain 
excellent persons there, like certain excellent persons in 
Charleston, frown upon newspaper reports of their social 
activities. In Syracuse, on the contrary, the Sunday 
newspapers have columns of " society notes " and the 
reporters v/ho go to dances and receptions prove their 
industry by writing long lists of the " among those pres- 
ent." Buffalo leans more to Syracuse custom in this 
regard. Rochester scans rather critically the man who 
comes to dwell there — unless he comes labeled with let- 
ters of introduction. In Syracuse and in Buffalo, too, 
there is more of a spirit of camaraderie. A man is taken 

153 



154 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

into good society there because of what he is, rather than 
for that from which he may have sprung. So it may be 
said that Syracuse and Buffalo breathe the spirit of the 
West in their social life, while Rochester clings firmly to 
the conservatism of the East. Indeed, her citizens rather 
like to call her " the Boston of the West," just as the 
man from the Missouri Bottoms called the real Boston 
" the Omaha of the East." 

Take these cities separately and their personality 
becomes the more pertinent and compelling. Consider 
them one by one as a traveler sees them on a west- 
bound train of the New York Central railroad — Syra- 
cuse, Rochester, Buffalo — and in the same grading they 
increase in population ; roughly speaking, in a geomet- 
rical ratio. Syracuse has a little more than a hundred 
thousand inhabitants, Rochester is about twice her size 
and Buffalo is about twice the size of Rochester. 

Each of them is the result of the Erie canal. There 
had been famous post-roads across central and western 
New York before DeWitt Clinton dug his great ditch, 
and the Mohawk valley together with the little known 
" lake country " of New York formed one of the earliest 
passage-ways to the West. But the Erie canal, providing 
a water level from the Great Lakes to the Hudson river 
and so to the Atlantic, was a tremendous impulse to the 
state of New York. Small towns grew apace and the 
three big towns were out of their swaddling clothes and 
accounted as cities almost before they realized it. The 
building of the railroads across the state and their merg- 
ing into great systems was a second step in their transi- 
tion, while the third can hardly be said to be completed 

— the planning and construction of a network of inter- 
urban electric lines that shall again unite the three and 

— what is far more important to each — bring a great 
territory of small cities, villages and rich farms into closer 
touch with them. s 




cc 



u 



UJ 



ROCHESTER — SYRACUSE — BUFFALO 155 

In Rochester, a good many years ago, one Sam Patch 
jumped into the falls of the Genesee. He first planned 
his spectacular jump for a Sunday, but the citizens of 
Rochesterville, as the town by the great falls was first 
known, objected strenuously to such profanation of the 
Sabbath. So Sam Patch jumped not on a Sunday but 
on a Friday, which almost any superstitious person might 
have recognized as an unfortunate change of date; and 
jumping, he did not survive to jump again. But the point 
of this incident hinges not on Fridays, but upon Sundays 
in Rochester. All that was a long time ago, but she has 
not changed her ideas of Sabbath observance very much 
since then — despite the vast change in Sunday across 
the land. The citizens of Rochester still go to church on 
Sunday and they " point with pride " to the big and pro- 
gressive religious institutions of their community. Peo- 
ple in Syracuse, however, have Sunday picnics and out- 
ings ofif into the country, while Buffalo has always been 
known for its " liberal Sunday," whatever that may 
mean. Rochester has always frowned upon that sort of 
thing. She has the same point of view as her Canadian 
neighbor across Lake Ontario — Toronto — a city which 
we shall see in a little time. Rochester rather cleaves to 
the old-fashioned Sabbath ; even her noisy beach down 
at Ontario's edge, which has always served as a sort of 
Coney island to western New York, has been a thorn 
in the side of her conservative population. If you want 
to stop and consider how the old-fashioned Sabbath of 
your boyhood days still reigns at the city at the falls of 
the Genesee, recall the fact that in one street that is 
bordered by some of the town's largest churches the trol- 
ley cars are not operated on Sundays.* In Philadelphia 

* A recent rerouting of the trolley cars in Rochester has left 
this particular street without regular service most of the days of 
the week. The fact remains, however, that for many years the 
Park avenue line had its terminal loop through Church street. 
On the Sabbath that terminal was moved bodily so that church- 
goers would not be annoyed. E. H. 



156 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

you will remember they used years ago to stretch ropes 
across the streets in front of the churches at service 
times. But imagine the possibilities of that sort of thing 
in New York, or Chicago, or San Francisco. 

Syracuse is famed for the Onondaga Indians and for 
James Roscoe Day. The Onondaga Indians are the old- 
est inhabitants, and a great help to the ingenious local 
artists who design cigar-box labels. No apologies are 
needed for Chancellor Day. He has never asked them. 
He has taken a half-baked Methodist college that stood 
on a wind-swept and barren hill and by his indomitable 
ability and Simon-pure genius has transformed it into 
a real university. For Syracuse University is tremen- 
dously real to the four thousand men and women who 
study within its halls. It is a poor man's college and 
Chancellor Day is proud of that. They come, these four 
thousand men and women, from the small cities and vil- 
lages, from the farms of that which the metropolitan is 
rather apt indifferently to term " Up State." To these, 
four years in a university mean four years of cultivation 
and opportunity, and so has come the growth, the vast 
hidden power of the institution upon the hill at Syracuse. 
She makes no claim to college spirit of surpassing di- 
mensions. She does claim individual spirit among her 
students, however, that is second to none. As a univer- 
sity — as some know a university — the collection of ill- 
matched architectural edifices that house her is typical ; 
but as an opportunity for popular education to the boys 
and girls of the rural districts of the state of New York 
she is monumental, and they come swarming to her in 
greater numbers each autumn. 

So much for the hill — they call it Mount Olympus — 
which holds the university and those things that are the 
university's. Now for downtown Syracuse; for while 
the city's newer districts are .ranged upon a series of 



ROCHESTER — SYRACUSE — BUFFALO 157 

impressive heights, her old houses, her stores and her 
factories are squatted upon the flats at the head of 
Onondaga lake. 

We all remember the pictures of Syracuse that every 
self-respecting geography used to print ; salt-sheds run- 
ning off over an indefinite acreage. We were given to 
understand that Syracuse's chief excuse for existence 
was as a sort of huge salt-cellar for the rest of the nation. 
Nowadays nine-tenths of the Syracusans have forgotten 
that there is a salt industry left, and will tell you glibly 
of the typewriters, automobiles, steel-tubing and the like 
that are made in their town in the course of a twelve- 
month. 

They will not tell you of one thing, for of that thing 
you may judge yourself. Life in Syracuse is punctuated 
by the railroad and the canal. The canal is not so much 
of an obstruction unless one of the cumbersome lift- 
bridges sticks and refuses to move up or down, but that 
railroad ! Every few minutes life in Syracuse comes to 
an actual standstill because of it. Men whose time is 
worth ten or fifteen dollars an hour and who grow puffy 
with over-exertion are violently halted by the passing 
of switch-engines with trails of box-cars. Appointments 
are missed. Board meetings at the banks halt for direc- 
tors — directors who are halted in their turn by the dig- 
nified and stately passage of the Canastota Local through 
the heart of the city. 

But the old canal is going to go some day — when the 
State's new barge canal well to the north of the town is 
completed — and perhaps in that same day Syracuse will 
have a broad, central avenue replacing the present dirty, 
foul-smelling ditch. Some day, some very big Syracusan 
will miss an appointment while he stands in Salina street 
watching the serene Canastota Local drag its way past 
him. That missed appointment will cost the very big 
Syracusan a lot of money and there will be a revolution 



158 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

in Syracuse — a railroad revolution. After that the loco- 
motives will no longer blow their smoky breaths against 
the fronts of Syracuse's best buildings and grind their 
way slowly down Washington street from the tunnel to 
the depot, for the railroad which operates them stands 
in the forefront of the progressive transportation systems 
of America, and it is only waiting for Syracuse to take 
the first definite step of progress. Some day Syracuse 
— Syracuse delayed — is going to take that step. Only 
a year or two ago the Chicago Limited held up the carni- 
val parade — and therein lies the final paragraph of this 
telling of Syracuse. 

She is a festive lass. Each September she rolls up her 
sleeves, her business men swell the subscription lists, her 
matrons and her pretty girls bestir themselves, and there 
is a concert of action that gives Syracuse a harvest week 
long to be remembered. By day folk go out to the State 
Fair and see the best agricultural show that New York 
state has ever known — a veritable agricultural show that 
endeavors not only to furnish an ample measure of fun, 
but also endeavors to be a real help to the progressive 
owners of those rich farms of central and western New 
York. By night Syracuse is in festival. Do not let them 
tell you that an American town cannot enter into the 
carnival spirit and still preserve her graciousness and a 
certain underlying sense of decorum. Tell those scofifers 
to go to Syracuse during the week of the State Fair. 
They will see a demonstration of the contrary — Salina 
street ablaze with an incandescent beauty, lined with row 
upon row of eager citizens. The street is cleared to a 
broad strip of stone carpet down its center and over this 
carpet rolls float after float. These in a single year will 
symbolize a single thing. In one September we recall 
that they represented the nations of the world and that 
the Queen of Ancient Ireland wore eyeglasses ; but that 
is as nothing, the policemen in Boston are addicted to 



ROCHESTER — SYRACUSE — BUFFALO 1 59 

straighteners, and Mr. Syracuse and Mrs. Syracuse, Miss 
Syracuse and Master Syracuse stand open-eyed in 
pleasure and go home very late at night on trolley cars 
that are as crowded as the trolley cars in very big cities, 
convinced that there possibly may be other towns but 
there is only one Syracuse.* 

All of which is exactly as it should be. Syracuse's 
great hope for her future rests in just such optimism on 
the part of her people. And in such optimism she has a 
strong foundation on which to build through coming 
years. 

Buffalo is not as frivolous as Syracuse. She cares but 
little for festivals but speaks of herself in the cold com- 
mercial terms of success. If you have ever met a man 
from Buffalo, when you were traveling, and he began to 
tell you of his town, you will know exactly what we 
mean. He undoubtedly began by quoting marvelous sta- 
tistics, some of them concerning the number of trains 
that arrived and departed from his native heath in the 
course of twenty-four hours. When he was through, 
you had a confused idea that Buffalo was some sort of 
an exaggerated railroad yard, where you changed cars 
to go from any one corner of the universe to any other 
corner. When your time came to see Buffalo for your- 
self, that confused idea returned to you. Your train 
slipped for miles through an apparently unending wilder- 
ness of branching tracks and dusty freight cars, past 
grimy round-houses and steaming locomotives, until you 
were ready to believe that any conceivable number of 
trains arrived at and departed from that busy town within 
a single calendar day. 

* Let it be recorded in the interest of accuracy that the fall festi- 
val of 1913 was not given — much to the disappointment of Mr. 
Syracuse, Mrs. Syracuse, Miss Syracuse and Master Syracuse. 
It is hoped, however, that the festival has not been permanently 
abandoned. The loss of its influence would be felt far outside 
of Syracuse. E. H. 



i6o PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

If you have approached her by water in the summer- 
time you have seen her as a mighty port, her congestion 
of water traffic suggesting salt water rather than fresh. 
When we come to visit the neighboring port of Cleve- 
land we shall give heed to the wonderful traffic of the in- 
land seas, but for this moment consider Buffalo as some- 
thing more than a railroad yard, a busy harbor, or even a 
melting-pot for the fusing of as large and as difficult a 
foreign element as is given to any American town to fuse. 
Consider Buffalo dreaming metropolitan dreams. The 
dull roar of Niagara, almost infinite in its possibilities of 
power, is within hearing. That dull roar has been Buf- 
falo's incentive, the lullaby which induced her dreams of 
industrial as well as of commercial strength. And much 
has been written of her growing strength in these great 
lines. 

To our own minds the real Buffalo is to be found in 
her typical citizen. If he is really typical of the city at 
the west gate of the Empire state, you will find him opti- 
mistic and energetic to a singular degree, and he needs 
all his optimism and his energ}' to combat the problems 
that come to a town of exceeding growth, just crossing 
the threshold of metropolitanism. Those problems de- 
mand cool heads and stout hearts. Buffalo is just begin- 
ning to appreciate that. It is becoming less difficult than 
of old for them to pull together, to dig deep into their 
purses if need be, and to plan their city of tomorrow in 
a generous spirit of cooperation. 

The Buffalonians have a full measure of enjoyment 
in their city. They are intensely proud of it and right- 
fully — do not forget the man who once told you of the 
number of railroad trains within twenty-four hours — 
and they are thoroughly happy in and around it. Niagara 
Falls and a half-dozen of lake beaches on Erie and On- 
tario are within easy reach, while nearer still is the lovely 
park of the town — which a goodly corner of America 



ROCHESTER — SYRACUSE — BUFFALO i6i 

i'emembers as the site of the Pan-American Exposition, 
in 1 90 1. The Buffalonians Hve much of the time out- 
doors, and that holds true whether they are able to pat- 
ronize their country clubs or the less pretentious suburban 
resorts. They play at golf, at baseball, at football, and 
in the long hard winter months at basketball and hockey 
and bowling. They organize teams in all these sports 
— and some others — and then go down to Rochester 
and enter into amiable contests with the folks who live 
by the Genesee. Syracuse, too, comes into the fray and 
these three cities of the western end of the state of New 
York fight out their natural and healthy rivalry in series 
upon series of sturdy athletic championships. The bond 
between them is really very close indeed. 

Rochester stands halfway between Syracuse and Buf- 
falo and as we have already said, is different from both 
of them. One difference is apparent even to the man 
who does not alight from his through train. For no 
railroad has dared to thrust itself down a main busi- 
ness street in Rochester ; in fact she was one of the very 
first cities in America to remove the deadly grade cross- 
ings from her avenues, and incalculable fatalities and 
near fatalities have been prevented by her wisdom. 
Many years ago she placed the^jpiain line of the New York 
Central railroad, which crosses close to her heart, upon 
a great viaduct. When that viaduct was built, a great 
change came upon the town. The old depot, with its 
vaulted wooden roof clearing both tracks and street and 
anchored in the walls of the historic Brackett House ; with 
its ancient white horse switching the cars of earlier days 
(as it is years and years and years since that white horse 
went to graze in heavenly meadows) vanished from sight, 
and a great stone-lined embankment — high enough and 
thick enough to be a city wall — appeared, as if by magic, 
while Rochester reveled in a vast new station, big enough 



i62 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

and fine enough for all time. At least that was the way 
the station seemed when it was first built in 1882. But 
alas, for restless America ! They have begun to tear 
the old station down as this is being written — a larger 
and still finer structure replaces it. And the folk who 
pray for the conservatism of our feverish American 
energy are praying that it will last more than thirty-one 
years ! 

But in just this way Rochester has grown apace and 
quite ahead of the facilities which her earlier generations 
thought would be abundant for all time. The high civic 
standard that forced the great railroad improvement in 
the earlier days when most American towns, like Topsy, 
were " jus' growin' " and giving little thought for the 
morrow, made Rochester different. It made her seek to 
better her water supply and in this she succeeded, tap- 
ping a spring pure lake forty miles back in the high hills 
and bringing its contents to her by a far-reaching aque- 
duct. It was a large undertaking for a small city of the 
earlier days, but the small city was plucky and it today 
possesses a water supply that is second to none. That 
same early placed high civic standard made fireproof 
buildings an actuality in Rochester, years in advance of 
other towns of the same size. 

That civic standard has worked wonders for the town 
by the falls of the Genesee. For one thing it has 
made her prolific in propaganda of one sort or another. 
Strange religious sects have come to light within her 
boundaries. Spiritualism was one of these, for it was 
in Rochester that the famed Fox sisters heard the myste- 
rious rappings, and it was only a little way outside the 
town where Joseph Smith asserted that he found the 
Book of Mormon and so brought a new church into ex- 
istence. And the ladies who are conducting the " Votes 
for Women " campaign with such ardor should not for- 
get that it was in Rochester that Susan B. Anthony lived 



ROCHESTER — SYRACUSE — BUFFALO 163 

for long years of her life, working not alone for the 
cause that was close to her heart, but in every way for 
the good of the town that meant so much to her. 

Perhaps the most interesting phases of the Rochester 
civic standard are those that have worked inwardly. 
She has a new city plan — of course. What modern city 
has not dreamed these glowing things, of transforming 
ugly squares into plazas of European magnificence, of 
making dingy Main and State streets into boulevards? 
And who shall say that such dreams are idly dreamed? 
Rochester is not dreaming idly. She has already con- 
ceived a wonderful new City Hall, to spring upwards 
from her Main street, but what is perhaps more interest- 
ing to her casual visitors in her new plan is the archi- 
tectural recognition that it gives to the Genesee. The 
Genesee is a splendid river — in many ways not unlike 
the more famous Niagara. You have already known 
the part it has played in the making of Rochester. Yet 
the city has seen fit, apparently, to all but ignore it. 
Main street — for Rochester is a famous one-street town 
— crosses it on a solid stone bridge but that bridge is 
lined with buildings, like the prints you used to see of 
old London bridge. None of the folk who walk that 
famous thoroughfare ever see the river. In the new 
scheme the old rookeries that hang upon the edge of 
Main street bridge are to be torn away and the river is 
to come into its own. And Rochester folk feel that that 
day can come none too soon. 

But the Rochester civic standard has worked no better 
for her than in social reforms. The phases of these are 
far too many to be enumerated here, but one of them 
stands forth too sharply to be ignored. A few years ago 
some Rochesterian conceived the idea of making the 
schools work nights as well as day. He had studied the 
work of the settlement houses in the larger cities, and 
while Rochester had no such slums as called for settle- 



i64 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

ment houses it did have a large population that demanded 
some interest and attention. For instance, within the 
past few years a large number of Italians have come 
there, and although they present no such difficult fusing 
problem as the Jews of New York, the Polocks of Buf- 
falo or the Huns of Pittsburgh, it is not the Rochester 
way to ignore in the larger social sense any of the folk 
who come to her. 

" We will make the school-houses into clubs, we will 
make them open forums where people can come evenings 
and get a little instruction, a little more entertainment, but 
best of all can speak their minds freely," said this enthu- 
siast. " We will broaden out the idea of the ward clubs." 

The ward clubs to which he referred were neat and 
attractive structures situated in residential parts of the 
town, where folk who lived in their own neat homes and 
who earned from three to eight thousand dollars a year 
gather for their dances, their bridges, their small lectures 
and the like. The enthusiast proposed to enlarge this 
idea, by the simple process of opening the school-houses 
evenings. His idea was immensely popular from the 
first. And within a very few weeks it was in process of 
fruition. The school-houses — they called them " Social 
Centers " — were opened and night after night they were 
filled. It looked as if Rochester had launched another 
pretty big idea upon the world. 

That idea, however, has been radically changed, today. 
One of the professors of the local university threw him- 
self into it, possibly with more enthusiasm than judgment, 
and was reported in the local prints as having said that 
the red flag might be carried in street parades along with 
the Stars and Stripes. That settled it. Rochester is a 
pretty conservative town, and its folk who live quietly 
in its great houses sat up and took notice of the profes- 
sor's remarks. Those great houses had smiled rather 
complacently at the pretty experiment in the schools. 



ROCHESTER — SYRACUSE — BUFFALO 165 

Of a sudden they decided that they were being trans- 
formed into incubators for the making of socialists or of 
anarchists — great houses do not make very discerning 
discriminations. 

The professor had kicked over the boat. A powerful 
church which has taken a very definite stand against 
Sociahsm joined with the great houses. The question 
was brought into local politics. The professor lost his 
job out at the university, and the school-houses ceased to 
be open forums. Today they are called " Recreation 
Centers " and are content with instruction and entertain- 
ment, but the full breadth of the idea they started has 
swept across the country and many cities of the mid- 
West and the West are adopting it. 

The Rochester way of doing things is a very good way, 
indeed. For instance, the city decided a few years ago 
that it ought to have a fair. It had been many years 
since it had had an annual fair, and it saw Syracuse and 
Toronto each year becoming greater magnets because of 
their exhibitions. Straightway Rochester decided that 
it would have some sort of fall show, just what sort was 
a bit of a problem at first. It wanted something far 
bigger than a county fair, and yet it could hardly ask 
the state for aid when the state had spent so much on its 
own show in nearby Syracuse. 

Then it was that Rochester decided to dig down into its 
own pockets. It saw a fortunate opening just ahead. 
The state in abandoning a penal institution had left four- 
teen or fifteen acres of land within a mile of the center 
of the city — the famous Four Corners. The city took 
that land, tore down the great stone wall that had en- 
circled it, erected some new buildings and transformed 
some of the older ones, created a park of the entire prop- 
erty and announced that it was going in the show busi- 
ness, itself. It has gone into the show business and suc- 
ceeded. The Rochester Exposition is as much a part 



i66 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

of the city organization as its park board or its health 
department. Throughout the greater part of the year 
the show-grounds are a public park, holding a museum 
of local history that is not to be despised. And for two 
weeks in each September it comes into its own — a great, 
dignified show, builded not of wood and staff so as to 
make a memorable season and then be forgotten, but 
builded of steel and stone and concrete for both beauty 
and permanency. 

" Now what are the things that have gone to make 
these things possible?" you are beginning to say. 
"What is the nature of the typical Rochesterian ? " 

Putting the thing the wrong way about we should say 
that the typical Rochesterian is pretty near the' typical 
American. And still continuing in the reversed order of 
things consider, for an instant, the beginnings of Roches- 
ter. We have spoken of these three cities of the western 
end of New York state as the first fruit of the wonder- 
ful Erie canal. That is quite true and yet it is also true 
that before the canal came there was quite a town at the 
falls of the Genesee, trying in crude fashion to avail itself 
of the wonderful water-power. And while the canal was 
still an unfinished ditch, three men rode up from the 
south — Rochester and Fitzhugh and Carroll — and sur- 
veyed a city to replace the straggling town. That little 
village had, during the ten brief years of its existence, 
been known as Falls Town. Col. Rochester gave his 
own name to the city that he foresaw and lived to see it 
make its definite beginnings. All that was in the third 
decade of the last century, and Rochester has yet to 
celebrate her first centenary under her present name. 

Her career divides itself into three epochs. In the 
first of these — from the days of her settlement up to 
the close of the Civil War — she was famed for her 
flouring-mills. She was known the world over as the 



ROCHESTER — SYRACUSE — BUFFALO 167 

Flour City, and she held that title until the great wheat 
farms of the land were moved far to the west. But they 
still continued to call her by the same name although 
they spelled it differently now — the Flower City. For 
a new industry arose within her. America was awaken- 
ing to a quickened sense of beauty. Flowers and florists 
were becoming popular, and a group of shrewd men in 
and around Rochester made the nursery business into a 
very great industry. In more recent years the nature 
of her manufactures has broadened — her camera fac- 
tory is the most famous in all the world, optical goods, 
boots and shoes, ready-made clothing, come pouring out 
of her in a great tidal stream of enterprise. 

She is an industrial city, definitely and distinctly. 
Fortunately she is an industrial city employing a high 
grade of labor almost exclusively, and yet none the 
less a town devoted to manufacturing. Once again, do 
not forget that she has not neglected her social life, 
and you may read this as you please. You may look 
away from the broadening work of the ward clubs and 
of the school-houses and demand if there is an aristoc- 
racy in Rochester. The resident of the town will lead 
you over into its Third ward — a compact community 
almost within stone-throw of the Four Corners, and shut 
off from the rest of the vulgar world by a river, a canal 
and a railroad yard. In that compact community, its 
tree-lined streets suggesting the byways of some tranquil 
New England community, is the seat of Rochester so- 
cial government. The residents of the Third ward are 
a neighborly folk, borrowing things of one another and 
visiting about with delightful informality among them- 
selves, and yet their rule is undisputed. 

East avenue — the great show street of Rochester — 
feels that rule. East avenue is lined with great houses, 
far greater houses than those of the Third ward — 
many of them built with the profits of " Kodak " stock 



i68 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

— yet East avenue represents a younger generation, a 
generation which seems to have made money rather 
easily. There has been some intermarriage and some 
letting down of the bars between the ambitious East 
avenue and the dominant Third ward — but not much 
of it. Rochester is far too conservative to change easily 
or rapidly. 

She is proud of herself as she is — and rightly so. 
Her people will sing of her charms by the hours — and 
rightly so, again. They live their lives and live them 
well. For when all is said and done, the glory of Roch- 
ester is not in her public buildings, her water-power, 
her fair, her movements toward social reform, not even 
in her parks — although Rochester parks are superb, for 
Nature has been their chief architect and she has ex- 
ecuted her commission in splendid fashion — nor does 
it reside in her imposing Main street, nor in her vast 
manufactories that may be translated into stunning ar- 
rays of statistics — her glory is in her homes. The 
tenement, as we know it in the big cities, and the city 
house, with its dead cold walls, are practically unknown 
there. Apartment houses are rarities — there are not 
more than twenty or thirty in the town — and conse- 
quently oddities. Your Rochesterian, rich and poor, 
dwells in a detached house on his own tract of land ; the 
chances are that he has market-truck growing in his back- 
yard, a real kitchen-garden. There are thousands of 
these little homes in the outlying sections of the town, 
with more pretentious ones lining East avenue and the 
other more elaborate streets. All of these taken together 
are the real regulators of the town. For the citizens of 
Rochester are less governed and themselves govern more 
than in most places of the size. That is the value of the 
detached house to the city. Detached houses in a city 
seem to mean good schools, good fire and police service, 




> 



ROCHESTER — SYRACUSE — BUFFALO 169 

clean streets, health protection, social progress — Roch- 
ester has all of these in profusion. 

East avenue, in its rather luscious beauty, represents 
these ideals of Rochester on dress parade. We rather 
think, however, that you can read the character of the 
town better in the side streets. Now a long street, filled 
with somewhat monotonous rows of simple frame houses 
does not mean much at a glance — even when the street 
is parked and filled for a mile with blossoming magnolias, 
as Oxford street in Rochester is filled. But such a 
street, together with all the other streets of its sort, 
means that much of the disappearing charm and loveli- 
ness of our American village life is being absorbed right 
into the heart of a community of goodly size. 

Sometimes citizens from other towns running hard 
amuck Rochester's conservatism call her provincial. She 
has clung to some of her small town customs longer than 
her neighbors, but of late she has attempted metropoli- 
tanism — they have builded two big new hotels in the 
place, and the radicals have dared to place a big build- 
ing or two off Main street — quite a step in a town which 
has become famous as a one-street town. 

But Rochester, like most conservatives, is careless of 
outside criticism. She points to the big things that she 
has accomplished. She shows you her streets of the de- 
tached houses and her parks — perhaps takes you down 
to Genesee Valley Park of a summer night when carnival 
is in the air and the city's band, the city's very ozvn band, 
if you please, is playing from a great float in midstream, 
while voices from two or three thousand gaily decorated 
canoes carry the melodies a long way. She shows you 
her robust glories, the fair country in wdiich she is situate. 
For miles upon miles of splendid highways surround her, 
the Genesee indolent for a time above the Valley Park 
appeals to the man with a canoe, the great lake to the 



170 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

north gives favorable breezes to the yachtsman. Do you 
wonder that the Rochesterians know that they dwell in a 
garden land, and that they are in the open through the 
fullness of a summer that stretches month after month, 
from early spring to late autumn ? Do you wonder that 
they really live their lives? 



lO 

STEEL'S GREAT CAPITAL 

A MAN, traveling across the land for the very first 
time, slips into a strange town — after dark. It 
is his first time in the strange town, of course. Other- 
wise it would not be strange. He finds his hotel with 
little difficulty, for a taxicab takes him to it. He im- 
mediately discovers that it is not more than two squares 
from the very station at which he has arrived. Still a 
friendly taxicab in a strange town is not an institution 
at which to scofi", and the man who is very tired is glad 
to get into his hotel room and to bed without delay. 

He awakes the next morning very early — at least it 
must be very early for it is still dark. It is dark indeed 
as he stumbles his way across the room to the electric 
switch. In the sudden radiance that follows, he sput- 
ters at himself for having arisen so early — for he is 
a man fond of his lazy sleep in the morning. He fum- 
bles in his pockets and finds his watch. Ten minutes to 
nine, it says to him. 

" Stopped," says the man, half aloud. " That's an- 
other time I forgot to wind it." 

But the watch has not stopped. Insecure in his own 
mind he lifts it to his ear. It is ticking briskly. The 
man is perplexed. He goes to the window and peeps 
out from it. A great office building across the way is 
gaily alight — a strange performance for before dawn 
of a September morning. He looks down into the street. 
Two long files of brightly lighted cars are passing 
through the street, one up, the other down. The glisten- 

171 



172 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

ing pavements are peopled, the stores are brightly lighted 

— the man glances at his watch once again. Eight min- 
utes of nine, it tells him this time. 

He smiles as he gazes down into that busy street. 

" This is Pittsburgh," he says. 

Later that day that same man stands in another win- 
dow — of a tall skyscraper this time — and again gazes 
down. Suspended there below him is a seeming chaos. 
There are smoke and fog and dirt there, through these 

— showing ever and ever so faintly — tall, artificial 
cliffs, punctured with row upon row of windows, brightly 
lighted at midday. From the narrow gorges between 
these cliffs come the rustle and the rattle of much traf- 
fic. It comes to the man in waves of indefinite sound. 

He lifts his gaze and sees beyond these artificial cliffs, 
mountains — real mountains — towering, with houses 
upon their crests, and steep, inclined railroads climbing 
their precipitous sides. In these houses, also, there are 
lights burning at midday. Below them are great stacks 

— row upon row upon row of them, like coarse-toothed 
combs turned upside down — and the black smoke that 
pours up from them is pierced now and then and again 
by bright tongues of flame — the radiance of furnaces 
that glow throughout the night and day. 

" We're mud and dirt up to our knees — and money 
all the rest of the way," says the owner of that office. 
He is a native of the city. He comes to the window and 
points to one of the rivers — a yellow-brown mirrored 
surface, scarcely glistening under leaden clouds but bear- 
ing long tows by the dozen — coal barges, convoyed by 
dirty stern-wheeled steamboats. 

" There is one of the busiest harbors in the world," 
says the Pittsburgh man. " A harbor which in tonnage 
is not so far back of your own blessed New York." 

The New Yorker, for this man is a New Yorker, 
laughs at the very idea of calling that sluggish narrow 



PITTSBURGH 173 

river a harbor. They have a real harbor in his town and 
real rivers lead into it. This does not even seem a real 
river. It reminds him quite definitely of Newtown 
creek — that slimy, busy waterway along which trains 
used to pass in the days when the Thirty-fourth street 
ferry was the gateway to Long Island. 

" We have tonnage in this town," says the proud resi- 
dent of Pittsburgh, " and if you won't believe what I 
tell you about the water traffic, how about our neat 
little railroad business? If you won't listen to our har- 
bor-master here when I take you down to him, look at 
the lines of freight cars for forty miles out every trunk- 
line railroad that gets in here. This is the real gathering 
ground for all the freight rolling-stock of this land." 

And then he falls to telling the native of Manhattan 
island how all that traffic has come to pass — how a mere 
quarter of a century ago the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie 
railroad had offered itself to the historic Erie for a mere 
hundred thousand dollars — and had been refused as 
not worth while. Today the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie is 
the pet child of the entire Vanderbilt family of aristo- 
cratic railroads, earning more clear profit to the mile 
than any other railroad in the world. The Pittsburgh 
man makes this all clear to his caller. But the man from 
New York only looks out again upon the city in semi- 
darkness at midday, and thinks of the towers of his own 
Manhattan rising high into the clearest blue sky that one 
might imagine, and whispers incoherently : 

" This Pittsburgh gets me." 

Pittsburgh gets some others, too. It gets them from 
the back country, green country lads filled with ambi- 
tion rather than anything else, and if they have the 
sticking qualities it makes them millionaires, if that 
so happens that such is the scheme of their ambitions. 
It has made some other millionaires, almost overnight, 
as we shall see in a few minutes. The picking for dol- 



174 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

lars seems good in the neighborhood of the confluence of 
the Monongahela and the Allegheny. 

Consider for a moment that confluence — the geog- 
raphy of Pittsburgh, if you please. In a general way the 
older part of the town has a situation not unlike that of 
the great metropolis of the continent. For New York's 
East river, substitute the Monongahela ; for the Hudson, 
the Allegheny ; and let the Ohio, beginning its long 
course at the Point — Pittsburgh's Battery — represent 
the two harbors of New York. Then you will begin to 
get the rough resemblance. To the south of the Monon- 
gahela, Pittsburgh's Brooklyn is Birmingham, set under 
the half-day shadows of the towering cliffs of Mount 
Washington. Allegheny — now a part of the city of 
Pittsburgh and beginning to be known semi-officially as 
the North Side — corresponds in location with Jersey 
City. 

And the problems that have beset Pittsburgh in her 
growth have been almost the very problems that from the 
first have hampered the growth of metropolitan New 
York. If her rivers have been no such stupendous af- 
fairs as the Hudson or the East rivers, the overpowering 
hills and mountains that close in upon her on every side 
have presented barriers of equal magnitude. To con- 
quer them has been the labor of many tunnels and of 
steep inclined railroads, the like of which are not to 
be seen in any great city in America. It has been no 
easy conquest. 

As a result of all these things the growth of the city 
has been uneven and erratic. Down on the narrow spit 
of flat-land at the junction of the two rivers that go to 
make the Ohio — a location exactly corresponding with 
Manhattan island below the City Hall and of even less 
area — is the business center of metropolitan Pitts- 
burgh — wholesale and retail stores, banks, office build- 
ings, railroad passenger terminals, hotels, theaters and 



PITTSBURGH 175 

the like. The same causes that made the skyscraper a 
necessity in New York have worked a like necessity in 
the city at the head of the Ohio. 

So it has come to pass that no one lives in Pittsburgh 
itself, unless under absolute compulsion. The suburbs 
present housing facilities for the better part of its folk 
— Sewickley and East Liberty vie for greatest favor 
with them and there are dozens of smaller communi- 
ties that crowd close upon these two social successes. 
" We can never get a decent census figure," growls the 
Pittsburgh man, as he contemplates the size of these out- 
lying boroughs that go to make the city strong in every- 
thing, save in that popular competitive feature of popu- 
lation. And that very reason made the merging of the 
old city of Allegheny a popular issue, indeed. 

The fact that Pittsburgh men live outside of Pitts- 
burgh goes to give her the fourth largest suburban 
train service in the country. Only New York, Boston 
and Philadelphia surpass her in this wise. Even San 
Francisco has less. One hundred and fifty miles to the 
northwest is Cleveland, the sixth city in the country 
and outranking Pittsburgh in population. There is not 
a single distinctive suburban train run in or out of 
Cleveland. From one single terminal in Pittsburgh four 
hundred passenger trains arrive and depart in the course 
of a single business day and ninety-five percent of these 
are for the sole benefit of the commuter. 

So congested have even these railroad facilities be- 
come that the city cries bitterly all the while for a tran- 
sit relief and experts have been at work months and 
years planning a subway to aid both the steam roads and 
the overworked trolley lines. At best it is no sinecure 
10 operate the trolley cars of Pittsburgh. Combined 
with narrow streets, uptown and downtown, are the 
fearful slopes of the great hills. It takes big cars to 
climb those hills, let alone haul the trailers that are a 



176 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

feature of the Pittsburgh rush-hour traffic. When the 
New Yorker sees those cars for the first time he looks 
again. They are chariots of steel, hardly smaller than 
those that thread the subway in his daily trip to and from 
Harlem, and when they come toward him they make him 
think of locomotives. The heavy car gives a sense of 
strength and of hill capability. But the company stag- 
gers twice each day under a traffic that is far beyond 
its facilities — and it staggers under its political burdens. 

For it is almost as much as your very life is worth to 
" talk back " to a street car conductor in Pittsburgh. 
The conductor is probably an arm of the big political 
machine that holds that western Pennsylvania town as 
in the hollow of its hand. The conductors get their 
jobs through their alderman, and they hold them through 
their alderman. So if a New York man forgets that he 
is four hundred and forty miles from Broadway, and 
gets to asserting his mind to the m^an who is in charge of 
the car let him look out for trouble. Chances are nine 
to one that he will be hauled up before a magistrate for 
breaking the peace, and that another arm of the politi- 
cal machine will come hard upon him. 

A man, who was a life-long resident of Pittsburgh, 
once made a protest to the conductor of a car coming 
across from Allegheny. The passenger was in the right 
and the conductor knew it. But he answered that pro- 
test with a volley of profanity. If that thing had hap- 
pened in a seaboard town, the conductor's job would not 
have been worth the formality of a resignation. In 
Pittsburgh a bystander warned — the passenger — and 
he saved himself arrest by keeping his mouth shut and 
getting off the car. 

But the Pittsburgh man had not quite lost his sense of 
justice, and so he hurried to a certain high officer of the 
street railroad company. When he came to the com- 
pany's offices he was ushered in in high state, for it so 



PITTSBURGH 177 

happened that the born Pittsburgh man was a director 
of that very corporation. It so happens that street 
railroad directors do not ride — Hke their steam railroad 
brethren — on passes, and the conductor did not know 
that he was playing flip-flap with his job. 

" You'll have to fire that man," said the director, in 
ending his complaint. " If that had happened at the 
club I would have punched him in the head." 

The big man who operated the street railroad looked 
at the director, and smiled what the lady novelists call 
a sweet, sad smile. 

" Sorry, Ben," said he, " but I know that man. He's 

one of Alderman X 's men, and if we fired him 

X would hang us up on half a dozen things." 

Do you wonder that in the face of such a state of 
things transit relief comes rather slowly to Pittsburgh? 

Pittsburgh men have been trying to worm their way 
out of their difficulties for about a century and a half 
now, for it was 1758 that saw a permanent settlement 
started there at the junction of the three great rivers. 
Before that had been the memorable fight and defeat of 
Braddock — not far from where more recently Mr. 
Prick and Mr. Carnegie have been engaged in a rivalry 
as to which could erect the higher skyscraper and most 
efifectually block out the fagade of the very beautiful 
Court House that the genius of H. H, Richardson de- 
signed — more than a score of years ago. At Brad- 
dock's defeat George Washington fought and it was no 
less a prophetic mind than that of the Father of His 
Country which foresaw and prophesied that Pittsburgh, 
with proper transportation facilities, would become one 
of the master cities of the country. 

Today, when Pittsburgh men grow nervous in one 
of their chronic fits of agitation — generally started by 
some talkative city, such as Chicago and Duluth, proclaim- 
ing herself as the future center of the steel industry — 



178 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

she gains comfort from the sayings of two Presidents — • 
General Washington, as just quoted, and the gentleman 
who sits at the head of the board of the United States 
Steel Corporation, who goes out there from time to time 
and tells them to be of good cheer, that the center of the 
steel business is irrevocably fixed within their town. 
Pittsburgh worries much more about the steel business 
than about the Richardson Court House, which has just 
been left high and dry upon a local Gibraltar because of 
the desire of the local aldermen to lower Fifth avenue 
some eight or ten feet. But who shall say that she should 
not be restive about a business that reaches an output 
in a single twelvemonth of something over 150,000,000 
tons? That is a jewel that is well worth the keeping. 

Philadelphia stands at the east end of Pennsylvania ; 
Pittsburgh is the west gate of that Keystone common- 
wealth. Yet two peas in a pod were never half so dif- 
ferent. Philadelphia stands for conservatism, Pitts- 
burgh for progress. While Philadelphia was climbing 
to the zenith of her power and influence through the 
first three-quarters of the last century and reaching her 
apotheosis in her great Centennial, Pittsburgh was quiet 
beneath her smoke umbrellas experimenting with that 
strange new metal, which man called steel. In the day 
dreams that Philadelphia enjoyed in 1876 Pittsburgh 
was forgotten. 

" I suppose the Pennsylvania railroad must have some 
place to end at," said a lady from Rittenhouse square, 
when her attention was called to the city at the junction 
of the three rivers. And in the next year that lady and 
many other ladies of the staunch old Quaker town were 
holding up their hands in holy horror at the news from 
Pittsburgh. Great riots, the bloodiest that had ever 
been known, were marking the railroad strike there — 
why, in a single day the rioters had burned the great 



PITTSBURGH 179 

Union station, every other railroad structure, and every 
car in the place. That was bad advertising for a town 
that had none too many friends. 

But Pittsburgh was finding herself — she is still in 
that fascinating process of development. For word was 
eking out from the rough mountains of western Penn- 
sylvania that a little group of Scotchmen — led by a 
shrewd ironmaster whom politic folk were already call- 
ing " Mr. Carnegie " — had made steel an economic struc- 
tural possibility. In this day when wood has become a 
luxury, steel is coming into its own and Pittsburgh is 
today the most metropolitan city between New York and 
Chicago. But she is still finding herself. The Survey, 
financed by Mrs. Russell Sage, and equipped with some 
of the ablest and fairest minded social workers in Amer- 
ica, has called sharp attention to her shortcomings. The 
Survey did its work thoroughly and it was not the work 
of a minute or a day or a week or a month. When its 
report was ready, Pittsburgh smarted. It was the sort 
of smarting that goes before a cure. 

Much has been done already. The man who went to 
Pittsburgh as recently as ten years ago carried away some 
pretty definite memories of neglected railroad stations 
and inferior hotel facilities. He remembered that in 
Liberty and Penn avenues — two of the chief shopping 
streets in the city — long trails of freight cars were con- 
stantly being shifted by dirty switch engines in among 
the trolley cars, while farther up these same avenues 
the Fort Wayne railroad tracks formed two of the nas- 
tiest grade crossings in America. When a fine new 
hotel was finally built away out Fifth avenue, he could 
sit on its porch and face Pittsburgh's famous farm. The 
Schenley farm stretched over the hill and far away. 
Its barns were sharply silhouetted upon the horizon, 
rail zigzag fences ran up and down the slopes and some- 
times one could see cattle outlined against the sky edge. 



i8o PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

The farm was a sore spot in Pittsburgh development. 
It occupied a tract somewhat similar in location to that 
of Central Park in Manhattan, and the struggling, grow- 
ing town crawled its way around the obstacle slowly — 
then grew many miles east once again. Resentment 
gathered against the farm, and finally a bill was slipped 
through at Harrisburg imposing double taxes on property 
held by persons residing out of the United States — a 
distinct slap at the Schenley estate. When the estate 
protested, word was carried oversea to it that if a good 
part of the farm were dedicated to the city as a park that 
bill would be withdrawn. 

So Pittsburgh gained its splendid new park, and a 
site for one of the finest civic centers in America. The 
farm has begun to disappear — the University of Pitts- 
burgh is absorbing its last undeveloped slope for an 
American Acropolis that shall put Athens in the pale. 
The new Athletic Club, the development of the Hotel 
Schenley, the great Soldiers' Memorial Hall which Alle- 
gheny county has just finished, the even greater Carnegie 
Institute, the graceful twin-spired cathedral, all are go- 
ing toward the making of this fine, new civic center, 
and Pittsburgh being Pittsburgh, and the Pirates social 
heroes, Forbes Field the finest baseball park in all this 
land — a wizardry of glass and steel and concrete — 
is a distinctive feature of this improvement. 

The freight trains are gone from the downtown shop- 
ping streets and the two wicked grade crossings dis- 
appeared when the Pennsylvania built its splendid new 
Union Station. Other fine railroad terminals and new 
hotels have added to the comfort of the stranger. They 
are beginning in a faint way to give transfers on the 
trolley cars, and there is more than a promise that some 
day wayfarers will not be taxed a penny every time they 
walk across the bridges that bind the heart of the city. 
The bridge companies are private afifairs, paying from fif- 



PITTSBURGH i8i 

teen to twenty percent in annual dividends, and they hang 
pretty tightly on to their bonanzas. But the Pittsburgh 
Chamber of Commerce is after them, and that Chamber 
is a fairly energetic body. It has already sought the 
devil in his lair and tried to abolish the smoke nuisance, 
with some definite results. 

A New York girl who has been living in Pittsburgh 
for the last four years complained that she had never 
seen but two sunsets there. There is hope for that girl. 
If the Chamber of Commerce keeps hard at its anti- 
smoke campaign, she may yet stand on the Point and 
down the muddy Ohio see something that dimly resem- 
bles the glorious dying of the day, as one sees it from 
the heights of New York city's Riverside Drive. 

A keen-eyed man sat in an easy chair in the luxury 
of the Duquesne Club, and faced the New York man. 

"Are we so bad?" he demanded. "You New York 
men like to paint us that way. You judge us falsely. 
You think that when you come out here you are going 
to see a sort of modern Sodom, bowing to all the gods of 
money and the gods of the high tariff. You think you 
are going to fairly revel in a wide open town, in the full 
significance of that phrase, and what do you see? 

" You see a pretty solid sort of a Scotch Presbyterian 
town, where you cannot even get shaved in your hotel 
on Sunday, to say nothing of buying a drink. And as 
for shows, you can't buy your way into a concert here 
on Sunday. Why, some of the elders of my kirk have 
even looked askance at Mr. Carnegie for the free recitals 
that he gives Sabbath afternoons in that splendid hall 
of the Institute. 

" There's your real Pittsburgher, and if some of the 
boys have chafed a bit under all the restraint that they 
have had here and gone to the wicked city after a little 
fling and a little advertising, is that any just reason why 
it all should be charged against Pittsburgh? Pittsburgh 



i82 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

has enough troubles of her own without borrowing any- 
additional ones. 

" The trouble is we've been making too much money 
to notice much about the boys, or give proper attention 
to some pretty vital civic problems — that's why the rot- 
tenness cropped out in the City Councils. It's the taint 
of the almighty dollar, Mr. New Yorker! Why, Mr. 
Carnegie made a couple of hundred of us millionaires 
within a single twenty-four hours. Can you think of any 
worse blow for an average town? 

" He took some of us, who had been working for him 
a long time, and got us into the business — some for an 
eighth interest, others for a sixteenth or even a thirty- 
second. That was great, and we appreciated it, but it 
kept us fairly tight on ready money for a while, even 
though Frick and Mellen were standing pat with an offer 
of a hundred million dollars for the bonds of the steel 
company. I tell you I was short on ready money myself, 
and wondering if I could not cut down on my house rent 
$2,000 a year and get my wife to keep two hired girls 
instead of three. Then you know what happened. Car- 
negie himself took over the bonds at a cold two hundred 
million dollars. Within a week or so I was in New 
York talking with an architect about building a new; 
house for the missus, and getting passage tickets through 
to Europe." 

The ironmaster called his automobile and bundled the 
New York man within it. 

" We are going down into the slums," he said. " I 
can show you a single block where thirteen different 
languages are spoken. That is the new Pittsburgh — 
taking up one another's burdens, or something of that 
sort, as they call it. It is queer until you get used to it, 
and when you get used to it, it makes you feel like going 
up on the roof and yelling that Pittsburgh is going to 



PITTSBURGH 183 

be the greatest city on earth, not just the greatest in ton- 
nage or in dollars. 

" That is why we are cottoning to that idea of a civic 
center out by Schenley Park ; that's why we pat Andrew 
Carnegie on the back when we know that he is giving 
us the best in pictures and in music in America ; that's 
why Frick is holding back with his horse pasture there 
in front of Carnegie Institute to build something big- 
ger and better. Don't you get the idea now of the big- 
ger and better Pittsburgh ? " 

The limousine stopped and the ironmaster beckoned a 
large, whiskered Russian to it. " Here's a real an- 
archist," he said, " but he is one of my proteges. He 
speaks down in a dirty hall in Liberty avenue, near the 
Wabash terminal, but he's for the new Pittsburgh, and 
he's for it strong — so we come together after a fashion." 

The Russian, who was a teacher, came close to the big 
automobile and pointed to a woman of his own people — 
a woman wretchedly poor, who dwelt in one of the hovels 
which are today Pittsburgh's greatest shame. 

" She's reading Byron," he said quietly, " and she has 
been in America less than six months. She says there 
is a magnificent comparison between Byron and Tol- 
stoy." 

That reminded the ironmaster of an incident. 

" After that bad time in 1907," he said, " 1 chanced 
into one of Mr. Carnegie's libraries, and the librarian 
complained to me of the way the books were being 
ruined. Their backs were being scratched and filled 
with rust and even shavings. I had an idea on that my- 
self. I went back to our own mill — it was pretty dull 
there and I was dodging the forlorn place as much as I 
could. But we were sifting out a gang from the men 
who were beating at our doors every morning for work, 
and even then we were carrying twice as many men as 



1 84 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

we really needed. I went around back of the furnaces 
and there were the library books — the men were read- 
ing them in the long shifts." 

" They weren't reading fiction ? " asked the New 
Yorker. 

" Not a bit of it," said the ironmaster. Then 
he added : 

" One of them spoke to me. He was only getting three 
days a week. ' Mr. Carnegie can give the books,' was 
his quiet observation, ' and the money to buy them. But 
we need more than money. Can't he ever give us the 
leisure to read them without its costing us the money 
for our food ? ' 

" That, New Yorker, from the mouth of one of those 
of the new Pittsburgh is the real answer to your 
question." 



II 

THE SIXTH CITY 

THEY call her the Sixth City, but that is only in a 
comparative sense, and exclusively in regard to 
her statistical position in the population ranks of the 
large cities of our land. For no real citizen of Cleve- 
land will ever admit that his community is less than first, 
in all of the things that make for the advance of a strong 
and healthy American town. His might better be called 
" the City of Boundless Enthusiasm." Your Cleveland 
man, however, is content to know it as the Sixth City. 

" Not that it really matters whether we are the fifth 
or the seventh — or the sixth," he tells you. " Only it 
all goes to show how we've bobbed up in the last twenty 
years. You know what we used to be — an inconsider- 
able lake port up on the north brink of Ohio with Cin- 
cinnati down there in the south pruning herself as a 
real metropolis and calling herself the Queen City. We 
might call ourselves the Queen City today and stretch 
no points, but that's a sort of fancy title that's gone out 
of fashion now. The Sixth City sounds more like the 
Twentieth Century." 

And Cleveland having thus baptized herself, as it were, 
proceeded to spread her new name to the world. 
" Cleveland — Sixth City " appeared on the stationery 
of her business houses ; her tailors stitched it in upon 
the labels of the ready-made suits they sent to all corners 
of the land ; her bakers stamped it on the products of 
their ovens ; big shippers stenciled it over packing-cases ; 
manufacturers even placed it upon the brass-plates of the 

185 



i86 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

lathes and other complicated machines they sent forth 
from their shops. Today when you say " Sixth City " 
to an American he replies " Cleveland," which is pre- 
cisely what Cleveland intended he should reply. 

Now why has Cleveland taken her new position of 
sixth among the cities of the land? Ask your Cleveland 
man that, and he will take you by the elbow and march 
you straight toward the docks, that not only line her 
lake front but extend for miles up within the curious 
twistings of the Cuyahoga river. 

" Lake traffic," he will tell you, and begin to quote 
statistics. 

We will spare you most of the statistics. It is meet 
that you should know, however, that upon the five Great 
Lakes there throbs a commerce that might well be the 
envy of any far-reaching, salty sea. To put the thing 
concretely, the freight portion of this traffic alone reached 
tremendous totals in 191 2. In the navigation months 
of that year, exactly 47,435,477 tons of iron ore and an 
even greater tonnage of coal moved upon the Lakes, 
while the enormous total of 158,000,000 bushels of grain 
were received at the port of Buffalo. And although 
there are tens of thousands of sailormen upon the salt 
seas who have never heard of Cleveland, the business of 
the port of Cleveland is comparable with that of the port 
of Liverpool, one of the very greatest and the very bus- 
iest harbors in all the world. For four out of every five 
of the great steel steamships carrying the iron ore and 
coal cargoes of the lakes are operated from Cleveland. 
Until the formation of the United States Steel cor- 
poration a few years ago she could also say that she 
owned four out of five of these vessels. And today her 
indirect interest in them, through the steel corporation, 
is not small. 

As the Cleveland man continues to din these statistics 
into your ear, you let your gaze wander. Over across 



CLEVELAND 187 

a narrow slip a gaunt steel framework rises. It holds 
a cradle, large enough and strong enough to accommodate 
a single steel railroad " gondola," which in turn carries 
fifty tons of bituminous coal. The sides of the table are 
clamped over the sides of one of these " gondola " cars, 
which a seemingly tireless switch-engine has just shunted 
into it. Slowly the cradle is raised to the top of the 
framework. A bell strikes and it raises itself upon edge, 
three-quarters of the way over. The coal rushes out of 
the car in an uprising cloud of black dust and drops 
through a funnel into the expansive hold of the vessel 
that is moored at the dock. The car is righted ; some 
remaining coal rattles to its bottom. Once again it is 
overturned and the remaining coal goes through the fun- 
nel. When it is righted the second time it is entirely 
empty. The cradle returns to its low level, the car is un- 
fastened and given a push. It makes a gravity movement 
and returns to a string of its fellows that have been 
through a similar process. 

You take out your watch. The process consumes 
just two minutes for each car. That means thirty cars 
an hour. In an hour fifteen hundred tons of coal, the 
capacity of a long and heavily laden train, have been 
placed in the hold of the waiting vessel. You are fa- 
miliar, perhaps, with the craft that tie up at the wharves 
of seaboard towns, and you roughly estimate the ca- 
pacity of this coal-carrier at some forty-five hundred 
tons. It is going to take but three hours to fill her great 
hold, and you find yourself astonished at the result of 
such computations. You confide that astonishment to 
your Cleveland man. He smiles at you, benignly. 

" That is really not very rapid work," he says, " they 
put eleven thousand tons of ore into the Corey in thirty- 
nine minutes up at Superior last year." 

And that is the record loading of a vessel for all the 
world. When the British ship-owners heard of that 



i88 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

feat at a port two thousand miles inland, they ceased to 
deride American docking facilities. 

The Cleveland man begins telling you something of 
this lake traffic in iron ore and soft coal — almost three- 
quarters of the total tonnage of the lakes. The workable 
iron deposits of America are today in greatest profusion 
within a comparatively few miles of the head of Lake 
Superior — nothing has yet robbed western Pennsyl- 
vania and West Virginia of their supremacy as produ- 
cers of bituminous coal. There is an ideal traffic con- 
dition, the condition that lines the railroad cars for forty 
miles roundabout Pittsburgh. The great cost in han- 
dling freight upon the average railroad comes from the 
fact that it is generally what is known as " one-way " 
business — that is, the volume of traffic moves in a 
single direction, necessitating an expensive and waste- 
ful return haul of empty cars. There is no such traf- 
fic waste upon the Great Lakes. The ships that go 
up and down the long water lanes of Erie and Huron and 
Superior do not worry about ballast for the return. 
They carry coal from Buffalo, Erie, Ashtabula, Con- 
neaut and Cleveland to Duluth and Superior and they 
come back with their capacious holds filled with red 
iron ore. There is your true economy in transportation, 
and the reflection of it comes in the fact that these ships 
haul cargo at the rate of .78 of a mill for a ton-mile, 
which is the lowest freight-rate in the world. 

Cleveland built these ships, in fact she still is building 
the greater part of them. And she thinks nothing of 
building the largest of these steel vessels in ninety days. 
Take a second look at that vessel — the coal cars are 
still pouring their grimy treasure into her hold. She 
is builded, like all of these new freighters, with a sever- 
ity that shows the bluff utilitarianism of the shipbuilders 
of the Great Lakes. None of the finicky traditions of 
the Clyde rule the minds of the men who today are 



CLEVELAND 189 

building the merchant marine of the Lakes. One deck- 
house, with the navigating headquarters, is forward; the 
other, with funnel and the other externals of the ship's 
propelling mechanism, is at the extreme stern. Amid- 
ships your Great Lakes carrier is cargo — and nothing 
else. No tangle of line or burden of trivials ; just a red- 
walled hull of thick steel plates and a steel-plate deck 
— broken into thirty-six hatches and of precisely the 
same shade of red — for these ships are quickly painted 
by hose-spray. Remember that it is ninety days — from 
keel-plates to launching. In another thirty days the 
ship's simple fittings are finished and her engines in 
her heart are ready to pound from down-Lakes to up- 
Lakes and back innumerable times. 

If we have given some attention in this Cleveland 
chapter to the traffic of the Great Lakes, it is, as we 
have already intimated, because the traffic of the Great 
Lakes has made her the Sixth City. It has also made 
the most important of her industries, the very greatest 
of her fortunes. Your Cleveland man will tell you of 
one of these — before you leave the pier-edge. It was 
the fortune that an old Lake captain left at his death — 
a little time ago — the fortune a mere matter of some 
twenty-eight millions of dollars. The old captain knew 
the Lakes and he had studied their traffic — all his life. 
But his will directed that his money should not be ex- 
pended in the building of ships. It provided that at 
least a quarter of a million of the income should annually 
go to the purchase of Cleveland real estate. And Cleve- 
land was quick to explain that it was not that the old 
man loved shipping less, but that he loved Cleveland real 
estate more. He had the gift of foresight. 

If you would see that foresight in his own eyes drive 
out Euclid avenue — that broad thoroughfare that leads 
from the old-fashioned Public Square in the heart of the 



190 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

city straight toward the southeast. Euclid avenue gained 
its fame in other days. Travelers used to come back 
from Cleveland and tell of the glories of that highway. 
Alas, today those glories are largely those of memory. 
The old houses still sit in their great lawns, but the grime 
of the city's industry has made them seem doubly old 
and decadent, while Commerce has pushed her smart new 
shops out among them to the very sidewalk line. Many 
of these shops are given over to the automobile business 
— a business which does not hesitate in any of our towns 
to transform resident streets into commercial. But in 
Cleveland one may partly forgive the audacity of this 
particular trade in recognition of its perspicacity. For 
Euclid avenue, rapidly growing now from an entirely 
residential street into an entirely business highway, is 
the great automobile thoroughfare of the East Side of the 
city. And when you consider that one out of every ten 
Cleveland families has a motor car, you can begin to 
estimate the traffic through Euclid avenue. 

There is a West Side of Cleveland — you might al- 
most say, of course — but one does not come to know it 
until he comes to know Cleveland well. The city is 
builded upon a high plateau that rises in a steep bluff 
from the very edge of the lake. Through this plateau, 
at the very bottom of a ravine, wide and deep, the 
navigable Cuyahoga twists its tortuous way into Lake 
Erie. It seems as if that ravine must almost have been 
cut to test the resources of the bridge-builders of Amer- 
ica. For it has been their problem to keep the Sixth 
City from becoming entirely severed by her great water 
artery. They have solved it by the construction of one 
huge steel viaduct after another but the West Side re- 
mains the West Side — and always somewhat jealous 
of the East. She knows that the great public buildings 
of Cleveland — that comprehensive civic center plan to 
which we shall come in a moment — are fixed for all 



CLEVELAND 191 

time upon the East. And so when Cleveland decides to 
build a great new city hall, the West Side demands and 
receives the finest market house in all the land. 

So it is that it is the East Side that your Cleveland 
man shows you alone when your time is limited, and so 
it is that Euclid avenue is the one great thoroughfare 
of the whole East Side. 

" If you want to know how we've bobbed up, look at 
here," the Cleveland man tells you. 

You look. A contractor is busy changing a railroad 
crossing from level to overhead ; a much-needed improve- 
ment — despite the fact that it should have been under- 
surf ace rather than overhead — when you come to con- 
'der the traffic that moves through Euclid avenue in 
•ail the daylight hours and far into the night. 

" When the old Cleveland and Pittsburgh — it's part 
of the Pennsylvania, now — was built, thirty-five or 
forty years ago, they thought they would put the line 
around the town. But the town was up to their line 
before they knew it — and they decided ten or a dozen 
years ago that they would put a suburban station here." 
He points to a handsome red brick structure of modern 
architecture. " The Pennsylvania folks are long-headed 
— almost always. But if they had known that Cleve- 
land was to become the Sixth City within ten years they 
never would have put two hundred thousand dollars in 
a grade crossing station at Euclid avenue. The way 
we've grown has sort of startled all of us." 

Today Euclid avenue is a compactly built thorough- 
fare for miles east of that Pennsylvania railroad cross- 
ing. It is at least two miles and a half from that crossing 
to Cleveland's two great educational lions — the Case 
School of Applied Science and the Western Reserve 
University — and they in turn only mark the beginning 
of the city's newest and most fashionable residence 
district. 



192 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

Indeed Cleveland has " bobbed up." And her growth 
within the last quarter of a century has been more than 
physical, more than that recorded by emotionless census- 
takers. For beneath those grimy old houses on Euclid 
avenue and the down town residence streets, beneath the 
roofs of those gray and grimy story-and-a-half wooden 
houses which line far less pretentious streets for long 
miles, lies as restless and as hopeful a civic spirit as any 
town in America can boast. It makes itself manifest 
in many ways — as we shall see. The man who first 
brought it into a working force was a resourceful little 
man who died a little while ago. But before Tom L. 
Johnson died he was Mayor of the city ; something 
more ; he was the best liked and the best hated man the 
Cleveland had ever known ; and he was better liked thaii 
he was hated. 

In person a plump little man with a ceaseless smile 
that might have been stolen from a Raphael cherub, a 
democratic little man, who knew his fellows and who 
could read them, almost unfailingly. And the smile 
could change from softness into severity — when Tom 
L. Johnson wanted a thing he wanted it mighty hard. 
And he generally succeeded in getting it. He could not 
only read men ; he could read affairs. He saw Cleve- 
land coming to be the Sixth City. And he determined 
that she should realize the dignity of metropolitanism in 
other fashion than in merely census totals or bank 
clearances. 

Johnson began by going after the street railroad sys- 
tem of the town. He had had some experience in build- 
ing and operating street railroads in other parts of the 
country, and he set out along paths that were not entirely 
unfamiliar to him. It so happened that at the time he 
began his crusade Cleveland was quite satisfied with her 
street railroad service. Her residents went out to other 
cities of the land and bragged about how their big yellow 



iy s; 




s'-'lte^ 




u 



CLEVELAND 1^3 

cars ran out to all the far corners of their rapidly grow- 
ing city. But Johnson was not criticising the service. 
He was merely saying in his gentle insistent way that 
five cents was too much for a man to pay to ride upon a 
street car. He thought three cents was quite enough. 
The street railroad company quite naturally thought 
differently. In every other town in the land five cents 
was the standard fare, and any Cleveland man could tell 
you how much better the car-service was at home. That 
company produced vast tables of statistics to prove its 
contentions. Tom L. Johnson merely laughed at the 
statistics and reiterated that three cents was a sufficient 
street-car fare for Cleveland. 

The details of that cause celebre are not to be recited 
here. It is enough here to say that Tom L. Johnson 
lived long enough to see three-cent fares upon the Cleve- 
land cars, and that the conclusion was not reached until 
a long and bitter battle had been fought. The conclu- 
sion itself as it stands today is interesting. The owners 
of the street railroad stock, the successors of the men 
who invested their money on a courageous gamble that 
Cleveland was to grow into a real city are assured of a 
legitimate six percent upon their stock. They cannot 
expect more. If the railroad earns more than that 
fixed six percent its fares must be reduced. If, on 
the other hand, it fails to earn six percent the fares 
must be raised sufficiently to permit that return. The 
fare-steps are simple, a cent at a time, with a cent being 
charged for a transfer, or a transfer being furnished 
free as best may meet the income need of the railroad. 

At present the fare is three cents, transfers being 
furnished free. A little while ago the fare was three 
cents, a cent being charged for the transfer. That 
brought an unnecessarily high revenue to the railroad, 
and so today while the conductor who issues you a 
transfer gravely charges you a cent for it, the con- 



194 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

ductor who accepts it, with equal gravity, presents you 
a cent in return for it. This prevents the transfers being 
used as stationery or otherwise frivoled away. For, 
while the street car system of Cleveland is among the 
best operated in America, it is also one of the most 
whimsical. Its cars are proof of that. Some of them 
are operated on the so-called " pay-as-you-enter " prin- 
ciple, although Cleveland, which has almost a passion 
for abbreviation, calls them the " paye " cars. These 
cars are still a distinct novelty in most of our cities. 
In Cleveland they are almost as old as Noah's Ark com- 
pared with a car in which you pay as you leave — a 
most sensible fashion — or a still newer car in which you 
can pay as you enter or pay as you leave — a choice 
which you elect by going to one end or the other of the 
vehicle. 

But the fact remains that Cleveland has three-cent 
fares upon her excellent street railroad system, to say 
nothing of having control over her most important util- 
ity, the street railroad, which pays six percent dividends 
to its owners. The three-cent fare seems standard in 
Cleveland. In fact, she is becoming a three-cent city. 
Small shops make attractive offers at that low figure, 
and " three-cent movies " are springing up along her 
streets. She has already gone down to Washington and 
demanded that the Federal government issue a three- 
cent piece — to meet her peculiar needs. So does the 
spirit of Tom L. Johnson still go marching on. 

It must have been the spirit of Tom L. Johnson that 
gave Cleveland a brand-new charter in this year of 
Grace, 1913. Into this new charter have been written 
many things that would have been deemed impossible 
in the charter of a large American city even a decade 
ago. Initiative and referendum, of course — Johnson 
and his little band of faithful followers were not satis- 
fied until they had gone to Columbus a few winters ago 



CLEVELAND 195 

and written that into the new constitution of the state 
of Ohio — a department of pubHc welfare to regulate 
everything from the safety and morals of " three-cent 
movies " to the larger questions of public health and even 
of public employment, the very sensible short ballot, 
and even the newest comer in our family of civic re- 
forms — the preferential ballot, although at the time 
that this is being written it is being sharply contested 
in the high courts at Columbus. Cleveland rejected the 
commission form of government. The fact that a good 
many other progressive American towns have accepted 
it, did not, in her mind, weigh for or against it. She 
has never been a city of strong conventions — witness 
her refusal to regard the five-cent fare as standard, 
simply because other towns had it. Neither has tradi- 
tion been permitted to warp her course. A few years 
ago her citizens decided that her system of street names 
was not good enough or expansive enough for a town 
that was entering the metropolitan class. So she 
changed most of her street names — almost in the pass- 
ing of a night. In most American towns that would 
have been out of the question. Folk cling to street 
names almost as they cling to family traditions. But 
Cleveland folk seemed to realize instantly that the new 
system of numbered cross-streets — with the broad diag- 
onal highways named " roads " — after the fashion of 
some English cities — was so far the best that she im- 
mediately gave herself to the new scheme with heart and 
soul, as seems to be her way. 

To tell of a splendid new charter adopted, of the con- 
trol gained over her chief utility and necessity, of the 
progressive social reforms that she houses, is not alone 
to tell of the splendid heart and soul that beats within 
the walls and roofs of her houses. It is, quite as much, 
to tell of a remarkable cooperation, remarkable when 
you consider that Cleveland has become a city of more 



196 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

than six hundred thousand humans. That cooperation 
may best be illustrated by a single incident : 

A retail dealer in hardware recently opened a fine 
new store out in Euclid avenue. He opened it as some 
small cities might open their new library or their new 
city hall — with music and a reception. His friends sent 
great bouquets of flowers, the concerns from which he 
bought his supplies sent more flowers ; but the biggest 
bunch of flowers came from the men who were his com- 
petitors in the same line of business. That was Cleve- 
land — Cleveland spirit, Cleveland generosity. Perhaps 
that is the secret of Cleveland success. 

One thing more — the plan for the Cleveland civic 
center. For the Sixth City having set her mental house 
in order is to build for it a physical house of great utility 
and of compelling beauty. You may have heard of the 
Cleveland civic plan. It is in the possibility that you 
have not, that we bring it in for a final word. When 
Cleveland set out to obtain a new Federal Post Office and 
Court House for herself, a few years ago, it came to her 
of a sudden that she was singularly lacking in fine public 
buildings. It was suggested that she should seek for 
herself not only a Federal building but a new Court 
House and City Hall as well. In the same breath it was 
proposed that these be brought into a beautiful and a 
practical group. It was an attractive suggestion. In 
the fertile soil of Cleveland attractive suggestions take 
quick root. And so in Cleveland was born the civic 
center idea that has spread almost like the proverbial 
wildfire all the way across the land. 

To create her civic group she moved in a broad and 
decisive fashion. She engaged three of the greatest of 
American architects — A. W. Brunner, John M. Car- 
rere, D. H. Burnham — two of them poets and idealists, 
the third almost the creator of America's most utilitarian 



CLEVELAND 197 

type of building, the modern skyscraper. To these men 
she gave a broad and unlocked path. And they created 
for her, along a broad Mall stretching from Superior 
street to the very edge of that mighty cliff that over- 
looks the lake, a plan for the housing of her greatest 
functions. 

It is not too much that Cleveland should dream of this 
Mall as an American Place de la Concorde. It was not 
too much when the architects breathed twenty millions 
of dollars as the possible cost of this civic dream. Cleve- 
land merely breathed " Go ahead," and the architects 
have gone ahead. The Post Office and the new County 
Building are already completed and in use, the City Hall 
should be completed before 191 5 comes to take his place 
in the history of the world. ■ Other buildings are to 
follow, not the least of them a new Union station — 
although there will be travelers who will sincerely regret 
the passing of Cleveland's stout old stone station, whose 
high-vaulted train-shed seemed to them in boyhood days 
to be the most lofty and wonderful of apartments. The 
bulk of this new open square is yet to be cleared of the 
many buildings that today occupy it. But that is merely 
a detail in the development of Cleveland's greatest archi- 
tectural ambition. 

The civic group can never be more than the outward 
expression of the ambitious spirit of a new giant among 
the metropolitan cities of America. As such it can be 
eminently successful. It can speak for the city whose 
civic heart it becomes, proclaiming her not merely great 
in dollars or in the swarming throngs of her population, 
but rather great in strength of character, in charity, in 
generosity — in all those admirable things that go to 
make a town preeminently good and great. And in these 
things your Cleveland man will not proclaim his as the 
Sixth City, but rather as in the front rank of all the 
larger communities of the United States. 



12 

CHICAGO — AND THE CHICAGOANS 

EARLY in the morning the city by the lake is astir. 
Before the first long scouting rays of earliest sun- 
light are thrusting themselves over the barren reaches 
of Michigan — state and lake — Chicago is in action. 
The nervous little suburban trains are reaching into 
her heart from South, from North and from West. The 
long trains of elevated cars are slipping along their 
alley-routes, skirting behind long rows of the dirty color- 
less houses of the most monotonous city on earth, thread- 
ing themselves around the loop — receiving passengers, 
discharging passengers before dawn has fully come upon 
the town. The windows of the tedious, almost endless 
rows of houses flash into light and life, the trolley cars 
in the broad streets come at shorter intervals, in whole 
companies, brigades, regiments — a mighty army of 
trucks and wagons begin to send up a great wave of 
noise and of clatter from the shrieking highways and 
byways of the city. 

The traveler coming to the city from the east and by 
night finds it indeed a mighty afl:"air. For an hour and 
a half before his train arrives at the terminal station, 
he is making his way through Chicago environs — com- 
ing from dull flat monotonies of sand and brush and pine 
into Gary — with its newness and its bigness proclaimed 
upon its very face so that even he who flits through at 
fifty miles an hour may read both — jolting over main 
line railroads that cross and recross at every conceiv- 

iq8 



CHICAGO 199 

able angle, snapping up through Hammond and Ken- 
sington and Grand Crossing — to the right and to the 
left long vistas with the ungainly, picturesque outlines 
of steel mills with upturned rows of smoking stacks, 
of gas-holders and of packing-houses, the vistas sud- 
denly closed off by long trails of travel-worn freight- 
cars, through which the traveler's train finds its way with 
a mighty clattering and reverberating of noisy echoes. 
This is Chicago — Chicago spreading itself over miles 
of absolutely flat shore-land at almost the extreme south- 
ern tip of Lake Michigan — Chicago proudly proclaim- 
ing herself as the business and the transportation 
metropolis of the land, disdaining such mere seaport 
places as New York or Boston or Baltimore or San 
Francisco — Chicago with the most wretched approaches 
on her main lines of travel of any great city of the 
world. 

If you come to her on at least one of the great rail- 
roads that link her with the Atlantic seaboard, you will 
get a glimpse of her one redeeming natural feature, for 
five or six miles before your train comes to a final grind- 
ing stop at the main terminal — the blue waters of the 
lake. This railroad spun its way many years ago on 
the very edge of the lake — much to the present-day 
grief of the town. It gives no grief to the incoming 
traveler — to turn from the sordid streets, the quick 
glimpses of rows of pretentious but fearfully dirty and 
uninteresting houses — to the great open space to the 
east of Chicago — nature's assurance of fresh air and 
light and health to one of the really vast cluster-holds 
of mankind. To him the lake is in relief — even in 
splendid contrast to the noise, the dirt, the streets dark- 
ened and narrowed by the over-shouldering construc- 
tions of man. From the intricate and the confusing, to 
the simplicity of open water — no wonder then that 
Chicago has finally come to appreciate her lake, that she 



200 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

seizes upon her remaining free waterfront like a hungry 
and ill-fed child, that she builds great hotels and office- 
buildings where their windows may look — not upon the 
town, stretching itself to the horizon on the prairie, but 
upon the lake, with its tranquillity and its beauty, the 
infinite majesty of a great, silent open place. 

In the terminal stations of the city you first begin to 
divine the real character of the city. You see it, a great 
crucible into which the people of all nations and all the 
corners of one of the greatest of the nations are being 
poured. Pressing her nose against the glass of a win- 
dow that looks down into surpassingly busy streets, over- 
shadowed by the ungainly bulk of an elevated railroad, 
is the bent figure of a hatless peasant woman from the 
south of Europe — seeing her America for the first time 
and almost shrinking from the glass in a mixture of 
fear and of amazement. Next to her is a sleek, well- 
groomed man who may be from the East — from an At- 
lantic seaport city, but do not be too sure of that, for 
he may have his home over on Michigan avenue and 
think that " New York is a pretty town but not in it 
with Chicago." You never can tell in the most Amer- 
ican and most cosmopolitan of American cities. At a 
third window is a man who has come from South Da- 
kota. He has a big ranch up in that wonderful state. 
You know that because last night he sat beside you on 
a bench in the dingy, busy office of the old Palmer 
House and told you of Chicago as he saw it. 

" I've a farm up in the South Dakota," he told you, 
in brief. " This is my first time East." You started 
in a bit of surprise at that, for it had always occurred 
to you that Chicago was West, that you, born New 
Yorker, were reaching into the real West whenever you 
crossed to the far side of Main street, in Buffalo. You 
looked at the ranchman, feeling that he was joking, and 



CHICAGO 20I 

then you took a second look into his tired eyes and knew 
that you were talking to no humorist. 

" The first real big town that I ever ran into," he said, 
in his simple way, " was Sioux City, and I set up and 
took a little notice on it. It seemed mighty big, but that 
was five years ago, and four years ago I took my stock 
down to Cudahy in Omaha — and there was a town. 
You could walk half a day in Omaha and never come 
to cattle country. Just houses and houses and houses 
— an' you begin to wonder where they find the folks 
to fill them. This year I come here with the beef for 
the first time — an' you could put Omaha in this town 
and never know the difference." 

After that you confessed, with much pride, that you 
lived in New York city, and you began. You knew the 
number of miles of subway from the Bronx over to 
Brooklyn, and the number of stories in the Wool worth 
building, all those things, and when you caught your 
breath, the stockman asked you if Tom Sharkey really 
had a saloon in your town, and was Steve Brodie still 
alive, and did New York folks like to go down to the 
Statue of Liberty on pleasant Sunday afternoons. You 
answered those questions, and then you told the stock- 
man more — of London, made of dozens of Omahas, 
where the United States was but a pleasant and withal a 
somewhat uncertain dream, of Paris the beautiful, and of 
Berlin the awfully clean. When you were done, you 
went with the stockman to eat in a basement — that is 
the Chicago idea of distinction in restaurants — and he 
took you to a lively show afterwards. 

Now you never would have wandered into a Broad- 
way hotel lobby and made the acquaintance of a perfect 
stranger, dined with him and spent the evening with 
him — no, not even if you were a Chicagoan and fear- 
fully lonely in New York. It is the Chicago that gets 
into a New Yorker's veins when he comes within her 



202 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

expanded limits, it is the unseen aura of the West that 
creeps as far east as the south tip of Lake Michigan. 
It made you acknowledge with hearty appreciation the 
" good mornings " of each man as he filed into the 
wash-room of the sleeping car in the early morning. 
You never say " good morning " to strangers in the 
sleeping cars going from New York over to Boston. 
For that is the East and that is different. 

A Chicago man sits back in the regal comfort of a 
leather-padded office chair and tells you between hurried 
bites of the lunch that has been placed upon his desk, of 
the real town that is sprawled along the Lake Michigan 
shore. 

" Don't know as you particularly care for horse-food," 
he apologizes, between mouthfuls, " but that's the cult 
in this neck-o'-woods nowadays." 

"The cult?" you inquire, as he plunges more deeply 
in his bran-mash. 

" Precisely," he nods. " We're living in cults out here 
now. We've got Boston beaten to culture." 

He shoves back the remnant of his " health food " 
luncheon with an expression that surely says that he 
wishes it was steak, smothered with onions and flanked 
by an ample-girthed staff of vegetables, and faces you — 
you New Yorker — with determination to set your path 
straight. 

" Along in the prehistoric ages — which in Chicago 
means about the time of the World's Fair — we were 
trying to live up to anything and ever}1;hing, but par- 
ticularly the ambition to be the overwhelmingest biggest 
town in creation, and to make your old New York look 
like an annexed seaport. We had no cults, no woman's 
societies, nothing except a lot of men miaking money 
hand over fist, killing hogs, and building cars and selling 
stuff at retail by catalogues. We were not aesthetic 



CHICAGO 203 

and we didn't particularly care. We liked plain shows 
as long as the girls in them weren't plain, and we had 
a motto that a big lady carried around on a shield. The 
motto was ' I will,' and translated it meant to the bot- 
tom of the sea with New York or St. Louis or any other 
upstart town that tried to live on the same side of the 
earth as Chicago. We were going to have two million 
population inside of two years and — " 

He dives again into his cultish lunch and after a mo- 
ment resumes : 

" The big lady has lost her job and we've thrown the 
shield — motto and all — into the lake. We're trying 
to forget the motto and that's why we've got the cult 
^habit. Vv^e're class and we're close on the heels of you 
New Yorkers — only last winter they began to pass the 
French pastry around on a tray at my club. We learn 
quickly and then go you one better. We've finally given 
Jane Addams the recognition and the support that she 
should have had a dozen years ago. We're strong and 
we're sincere for culture — the university to the south 
of us has had some funny cracks but that is all history. 
Together with the one to the north of us, they are finally 
institutions — and Chicago respects them as such. 

" Take opera. We used to think it w^as a fad to hear 
good music, and only the society folks went to hear it 
— so that the opera fairly starved to death when it 
came out here. Now they are falling over one another 
to get into the Auditorium, and our opera company is 
not only an institution but you New Yorkers would give 
your very hearts to have it in your own big opera house." 

" You'll build an opera house out here then," you ven- 
ture, " the biggest — " 

He interrupts. 

" Not necessarily the biggest," he corrects, " but as fine 
as the very best." 

The talk changes. You are frankly interested in the 



204 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

cults. You have heard of how one is working in the 
pubHc schools, how the school children of Chicago work 
in classrooms with the windows wide open, and you ask 
him about it. 

" It must be fine for the children ? " you finally ven- 
ture. 

" It is," he says. " My daughter teaches in a school 
down Englewood way, and she says that it is fine for 
the children — but hell on the teachers. They weren't 
trained to it in the beginning." 

You are beginning to understand Chicago. A half 
an hour ago you could not have understood how a man 
like this — head of a giant corporation employing half 
a hundred thousand workmen, a man with three or four 
big houses, a stable full of automobiles, a man of vast 
resources and influences — would have his daughter 
teaching in a public school. You are beginning to un- 
derstand the man — the man who is typical of Chicago. 
You come to know him the more clearly as he tells 
you of the city that he really loves. He tells you how 
Sorolla " caught on " over at the Institute — although 
more recently the Cubists rather dimmed the brilliance 
of the Spaniard's reception — and how the people who 
go to the Chicago libraries are reading less fiction and 
more solid literature all the while. Then — of a sud- 
den, for he realizes that he must be back again into the 
grind and the routine of his work — he turns to you 
and says : 

" And yesterday we had the big girl and the motto. 
It was hardly more than yesterday that we thought that 
population counted, that acreage was a factor in the 
consummation of a great city." 

So you see that Chicago is only America, not boastful, 
not arrogant, but strong in her convictions, strong in 
her sincerity, strong in her poise between right and 




u 




CHICAGO 205 

power together, and not merely power without right. 
A city set in the heart of America must certainly take 
strong American tone, no matter how many foreigners 
New York's great gateway may pour into her ample lap 
in the course of a single twelvemonth. Chicago has 
taken that dominating tone upon herself.. 

She is a great city. Her policemen wear star-shaped 
badges after the fashion of country constables in rural 
drama, and her citizens call the trolleys that run after 
midnight " owl cars," but she is a great city none the 
less for these things. Her small shops along Michigan 
avenue have the smartness of Paris or of Vienna, the 
greatest of her department stores is one of the greatest 
department stores in all the land, which means in the 
whole world. It is softly carpeted, floor upon floor, and 
the best of Chicago delights to lunch upon one of its 
upper floors. Chicago likes to go high for its meals 
or else, as we have already intimated, down into base- 
ments. The reason for this last may be that one of the 
world's greatest restauranteurs, who had his start in 
the city by Lake Michigan, has always had his place 
below sidewalk level on a busy corner of the city. 

The city is fearfully busy at all of its downtown 
corners. New Yorkers shudder at Thirty-fourth street 
and Broadway. Inside the Chicago loop are several 
dozen Thirty-fourth streets and Broadways. There you 
have it — the Chicago loop, designed to afford mag- 
nificent relief to the town and in effect having tightly 
drawn a belt about its waist. The loop is a belt-line 
terminal, slightly less than a mile in diameter, designed 
to serve the elevated railroads that stretch their cater- 
pillar-like structures over three directions of the wide- 
spread town. Within it are the theaters, the hotels, the 
department stores, the retail district, and the wholesale 
and the railroad terminals. Just without it is an arid 
belt and them somewhere to the north, the west and 



2o6 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

the south, the great residential districts. So it is a mis- 
take. For, with the exception of a Httle way along Mich- 
igan avenue to the south, the loop has acted against the 
growth of the city, has kept it tightly girdled within 
itself. 

" Within the loop," is a meaningful phrase in Chi- 
cago. It means congestion in every form and the very 
worst forms to the fore. It means that what was orig- 
inally intended to be an adequate terminal to the various 
elevated railroads has become a transportation abomina- 
tion and a matter of local contempt. For you cannot 
exaggerate the condition that it has created. It is fear- 
ful on ordinary days, and when you come to extraordi- 
nary days, like the memorable summer when the Knights 
Templar held their triennial conclave there, the news- 
papers print " boxed " summaries of the persons killed 
and injured by congestion conditions " within the loop." 
That takes it out of being a mere laughing matter. 

It is no laughing matter to folks who have to thread 
it. Trolley cars, automobiles, taxicabs, the long lum- 
bering 'buses that remind one of the photographs of 
Broadway, New York, a quarter of a century ago or 
more, entangle themselves with one another and with 
unfortunate pedestrians and still no one comes forward 
with practical relief. The 'buses are peculiarly Chicago 
institutions. For long years they have been taking pas- 
sengers from one railroad station to another. A con- 
siderable part of Western America has been ferried 
across the city by Lake Michigan, in these institutions. 
For Chicago, with the wisdom of nearly seventy-five 
years of growth, has steadily refused to accept the union 
station idea. St. Louis has a union station — and bit- 
terly regrets it. Modern big towns are scorning the idea 
of a union station ; in fact, Buffalo has just rejected the 
scheme for herself. For a union station, no matter how 
big or how pretentious it may be architecturally, will 



CHICAGO 207 

reduce a city to way-station dimensions. St. Louis is 
a big town, a town with personality, the great trunk lines 
of east and south and west have terminals there; but the 
many thousands of travelers who pass through there in 
the course of a twelvemonth, see nothing of her. They 
file from one train into the waiting-room of her glorious 
station — one of the few really great railroad stations 
of the world — and in a little while take an outbound 
train — • without ever having stepped out into the streets 
of the town. 

In Chicago — as it is almost a form of lese majeste 
to discuss St. Louis in a chapter devoted to Chicago we 
herewith submit our full apologies — four-fifths of the 
through passengers have to be carried in the omnibuses 
from one of the big railroad stations to another. They 
know that in advance, and they generally arrange to 
stop over there for at least a night. This means busi- 
ness for the hotels, large and small. It also means 
business for the retail stores and the theaters. And it 
is one of the ways that Chicago preserves her metro- 
politanism. 

And yet with all of that metropolitanism — there is 
a spirit in Chicago that distinctly breathes the smaller 
town, a spirit that might seem foreign to the most im- 
portant city that we have between the two oceans. It 
is the spirit of Madison, or Ottumwa, or Jackson, per- 
haps a little flavor still surviving of the not long-distant 
days when Chicago was merely a town. You may or 
you may not know that in the days before her terrific 
fire she was called " the Garden City." The catalpa trees 
that shaded her chief business streets had a wide fame, 
and older prints show the Cook County Court House 
standing in lawn-plats. In those days Chicago folk 
knew one another and, to a decent extent, one another's 
business. In these days, much of that town feeling 
remains. You sit in the great tomb-like halls of the 



2o8 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

Union League, or in the more modern University Club, 
perhaps up in that wonderful bungalow which the Cliff- 
dwellers have erected upon the roof of Orchestra Hall, 
and you hear all of the small talk of the town. Smith 
has finally got that franchise, although he will pay mighty 
well for it ; Jones is going to put another fourteen-story 
addition on his store. Wilkins has bought a yacht that 
is going to clean up everything on the lake, and then 
head straight for laurels on the Atlantic seaboard. You 
would have the same thing in a smaller western town, 
expressed in proportionate dimensions. After all, the 
circle of men who accomplish the real things in the real 
Chicago is wonderfully small. But the things that they 
accomplish are very large, indeed. 

They will take you out to see some of these big things 
— that department store, without an equal outside of 
New York or Philadelphia at least, and where Chicago 
dearly loves to lunch ; a mail-order house which actually 
boasts that six acres of forest timber are cleared each 
day to furnish the paper for its catalogue, of which a 
mere six million copies are issued annually ; they will 
point out in the distance the stacks and smoke clouds of 
South Chicago and will tell you in tens of thousands of 
dollars, the details of the steel industry ; take you, of 
course, to the stock-yards and there tell you of the hor- 
rible slaughter that goes forward there at all hours of 
the day and far into the night. Perhaps they will show 
you some of the Chicago things that are great in an- 
other sense — Hull House and the McCormick Open Air 
School, for instance. And they will be sure to show 
you the park system. 

A good many folk. Eastern and Western, do not give 
Chicago credit for the remarkable park system that she 
has builded up within recent years. These larger parks, 
with their connecting boulevards, make an entire circuit 
around the back of the town, and the city is making a 



CHICAGO 209 

distinct effort to wrest the control of the water-front 
from the railroad that has skirted it for many years, so 
that she may make all this park land, too — in connec- 
tion with her ambitious city plan. She has accomplished 
a distinct start already in the water-front plan along her 
retail shop and hotel district — from Twelfth street 
north to the river. The railroad tracks formerly ran 
along the edge of the lake all that distance. Now they 
are almost a third of a mile inland ; the city has re- 
claimed some hundreds of acres from the more shallow 
part of Lake Michigan and has in Grant Park a pleasure- 
ground quite as centrally located as Boston's famous 
Common. It is still far from complete. While the 
broad strip between Michigan avenue and the depressed 
railroad tracks is wonderfully trim and green, and the 
Art Institute standing within it so grimy that one might 
easily mistake it for old age, the " made ground " to the 
east of the tracks is still barren. But Chicago is making 
good use of it. The boys and young men come out of 
the office-buildings in the noon recess to play baseball 
there, the police drill and parade upon it to their heart's 
content, it is gaining fame as a site for military encamp- 
ments and aviation meets. 

Chicago makes good use of all her parks. You look 
a long way within them before you find the " Keep off 
the Grass " signs. And on Saturday afternoons in mid- 
summer you will find the park lawns thronged with 
picnic parties — hundreds and even thousands of them 
— bringing their lunches out from the tighter sections 
of the town and eating them in shade and comfort and 
the cooling breezes off Lake Michigan. For Chicago 
regards the lake as hardly more than an annex to her 
park system, even today when the question of lake-front 
rights is not entirely settled with the railroad. On pleas- 
ant summer days, her residents go bathing in the lake 
by the thousands, and if they live within half a dozen 



210 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

blocks of the shore they will go and come in their bath- 
ing suits, with perhaps a light coat or bath-robe thrown 
over them. A man from New York might be shocked 
to see a Chicago man in a bathing suit riding a motor- 
cycle down an important residence street — without the 
semblance of coat or robe ; but that is Chicago, and Chi- 
cago seems to think nothing of it. She wonders if a 
man from Boston might not be embarrassed to see a 
coatless, vestless, collarless, suspendered man driving 
a four-thousand-dollar electric car through Michigan 
avenue. 

Chicago is fast changing, however, in these respects. 
She is growing more truly metropolitan each twelve- 
month — less like an overgrown country town. It was 
only a moment ago that we sat in the office of the manu- 
facturer, and he told us of the Chicago of yesterday, 
of the big girl who had " I will " emblazoned upon her 
shield. There is a Chicago of tomorrow, and a hint of 
its glory has been spread upon the walls of a single great 
gallery of the Art Institute, in the concrete form of 
splendid plans and perspectives. The Chicago of to- 
morrow is to be dififerent ; it is to forget the disadvan- 
tages of a lack of contour and reap those of a mag- 
nificent shore front. In the Chicago of tomorrow the 
railroads will not hold mile after mile of lake-edge for 
themselves, the elevated trains will cease to have a merry- 
go-round on the loop, the arid belt between downtown 
and uptown will have disappeared, great railroad termi- 
nal stations and public buildings built in architectural 
plan and relation to one another are to arise, her splen- 
did park and boulevard system is to be vastly multiplied. 

Chicago looks hungrily forward to her tomorrow. 
She is never discouraged with her today, but with true 
American spirit, she anticipates the future. The pres- 
ent generation cares little for itself, it can tolerate the 
loop and its abominations, the hodge-podge of the queer 



CHICAGO 211 

and the nouveau that distinguishes the city by the lake 
in this present year of grace. But the oncoming gener- 
ations ! There is the rub. The oncoming generations 
are to have all that the wisdom and the wealth of today 
can possibly dedicate to them. There, then, is your 
Chicago spirit, the dominating inspiration that rises above 
the housetops of rows of monotonous, dun-colored 
houses and surveys the sprawling, disorderly town, and 
proclaims it triumphant over its outer self. 



13 

THE TWIN CITIES 

A FINE yellow train takes you from Chicago to 
St. Paul and Minneapolis, in the passing of a single 
night. And if you ever meet in the course of your 
travel the typical globe-trotter who is inclined to carp 
at American railroads, refer him to these yellow trains 
that run from Chicago up into the Northwest. There 
are no finer steam caravans in all the entire world. And 
when the globe-trotter comes back at you with his telling 
final shot about the abominable open sleepers of Amer- 
ica — and you in your heart of hearts must think them 
abominable — tell him in detail of the yellow trains. 
For a price not greater than he would pay for a room 
in a first-class hotel over-night, he can have a real room 
in the yellow trains. Like the compartments in the night- 
trains of Europe? No, not at all. These are real 
rooms — a whole car filled with them and they are the 
final and unanswerable argument for the comfort and 
luxury of the yellow trains. 

In such a stateroom and over smooth rails you sleep 
— sleep as a child sleeps until Lemuel, the porter, comes 
and tears you forth by entreaties, persuading you that 
you are almost upon the brink of — not St. Peter but of 
St. Paul. Of course, Lemuel has let his enthusiasm 
carry away his accuracy — even a porter upon a yellow 
train is apt to do that — but you have full chance to 
arise and dress leisurely before your train stops in the 
ancient ark of a LTnion station * upon the river level at 

* Since the above was written word has come of the destruction 
of the Union station by fire, an event which will not be regretted 
by travelers or by residents of the place. E. H. 

■212 



ST. PAUL — MINNEAPOLIS 213 

the capital of the state of Minnesota. For at St. Paul 
you have come to the Mississippi — the Father of Wa- 
ters of legendary lore. If you have only seen the stream 
at St. Louis or at New Orleans, polluted by the muddy 
waters of the Missouri or the Ohio or a dozen sluggish 
southern streams, you will not recognize the clear north- 
ern river flowing turbulently through a high-walled 
gorge, as the Mississippi. There are a few of the flat- 
bottomed, gaily caparisoned steamboats at the St. Paul 
to heighten the resemblance between the lower river and 
the upper, but that is all. 

St. Paul owes her birth to the river-trade neverthe- 
less. For she was, and still is, at the real head of navi- 
gation on the Mississippi and in other days that meant 
very much indeed. A few miles above her levee were 
the falls of St. Anthony and a thriving little town called 
Minneapolis — ■ of which very much more in a moment. 
From that levee at St. Paul began the first railroad build- 
ing into the then unknown country of the Northwest. 
The first locomotive — the William Crooks — which ran 
into the virgin territory is still carefully preserved. 
And the man who made railroading from St. Paul into 
a great trunk line system still lives in the town. 

He began by being assistant wharfmaster — in the 
days when there was something to do in such a job. 
Today they know him as the Empire Builder. The 
Swedes, who form so important a factor in the popula- 
tion of the Twin Cities, call him " Yem Hill " and he 
loves it. But he is entered in all records as James J. 
Hill. 

To tell the story of the growth of Jim Hill from 
wharfmaster to master of the railroads, would be to tell 
the story of one of the two or three really great men 
who are living in America today. It is a story closely 
interwoven with the story of St. Paul, the struggling 
town to which he came while yet a mere boy. He has 



214 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

lived to see St. Paul become an important city, the rival 
village at the falls of St. Anthony even exceed her in 
size and in commercial importance, but his affection for 
the old river town to which he has given so much of his 
life and abundant personality has not dimmed. He has 
made it the gateway of his Northwest and when one 
says " Hill's Northwest " he says it advisedly ; for while 
there might have been a Northwest without Jim Hill, 
there would have been no Jim Hill without the North- 
west. 

He found it a raw and little known land over which 
stretched a single water-logged railroad fighting adver- 
sity, and in momentary danger of extinction through 
receivership ; a trunk-line railroad at that time dis- 
tinguished more for its arrogance than for any other 
one feature of its being. Somewhere in the late eighties 
J. J. Hill took a trip over that railroad. He saw Seattle 
for the first time and found it a mere lumber-shipping 
town of but a few thousand population and with but 
little apparent future. He saw great stretches of open 
country — whole counties the size of the majestic states 
of New York and of Pennsylvania and still all but un- 
known. He also saw unbridled streams, high-seated 
mountain ranges and because J. J. Hill was a dreamer he 
saw promise in these things. 

From that trip he returned to the budding city of St. 
Paul, enthused beyond ordinary measure, and determined 
that in the coming development of the half-dozen terri- 
tories at the northwestern corner of the country he would 
share no ordinary part. He turned his back on the 
navigation of the Mississippi — already beginning to 
wane — and gave his attention to railroading. Purchas- 
ing an inconsequential lumber railroad in Minnesota, he 
laid the foundations for his Great Northern system. 
There was a something about Jim Hill in those earlier 
days by which he could give his enthusiasm and his lofty 



ST. PAUL — MINNEAPOLIS 215 

inspiration to those with whom he came in contact. 
That rare faculty was his salvation. Men listened to 
the confident talker from St. Paul and then placed their 
modest savings at his disposal. They have not regretted 
their steps. The Great Northern, through Hill's care- 
ful leadership has, despite much of the sparse territory 
through which it passes, become one of the great con- 
servative railroad properties of the United States. 

But Hill did more. He took that earlier system — 
the Northern Pacific, so closely allied to his territory — 
and made it hardly second in efficiency to the Great 
Northern itself. Both of these great railroads of the 
Northwest have never reached farther east than St. 
Paul, which Hill, with that fine sentiment which is so 
important a part of his nature, has been pleased to main- 
tain as the gateway city of his own part of the land. 
But, while he has been a most helpful citizen of St. Paul, 
he has not hesitated to dominate her. A few years ago 
when the Metropolitan company presenting grand opera 
came to St. Paul, it was Hill who headed the subscrip- 
tion list for a gi:arantee — headed it with a good round 
figure. Three days before the opening night of the opera 
he walked into the passenger office of the linking rail- 
road that he owned between the Twin Cities and Chi- 
cago. The singers were scheduled to come from 
Chicago. 

'' Are you going to bring the troupe up in extra cars 
or in a special train ? " he demanded, in his peremptory 
fashion. 

There was confusion in that office, and finally it was 

explained to him that a rival line, the M , had been 

given the haul of the special train, as a return courtesy 
for having placed its advertisement on the rear cover 
of the opera programmes. Hill's muscles tightened. 

" If the troupe doesn't come up over our road," he 
said, " I will withdraw the opera subscription." 



2i6 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

The M road lost the movement of that opera 

company. 

Hill is an advertiser, a patient, persistent and entirely- 
consistent user of public print in every form. Of the 
really big men of the land he is perhaps the most acces- 
sible. His door swings quickly open to any resident of 
the Northwest. He is in demand at public dinners in 
the East and at every conceivable function in his own 
territory. And yet those folk of his own town who come 
to know Mr. Hill intimately know him rather as a great 
publicist, no poor musician, a painter of real ability, and 
a kind-hearted neighbor. His house in Summit avenue 
contains one of the finest art galleries west of Chicago. 
In this rare taste for good art he is not unlike the late 
Collis P. Huntington, or Sir William C. Van Home, the 
dominating force of the Canadian Pacific. 

Hill has a real faculty not only for judging, but for 
executing oil paintings. It is related on good authority 
that, having been a member of a committee to purchase 
a portrait of a distinguished western railroader, he found 
the picture as it hung in the artist's studio in Chicago far 
from his liking. 

" He's missed W 's expression entirely," said the 

Empire Builder. And so saying he grasped a palette 
that was resting on a table, dove his brush into the soft 
paints, and before the astonished artist could recover 
enough self-possession to protest, Hill was deftly at 
work upon the canvas. In five minutes he had convinced 
the little committee of which he was chairman, that the 
expression of the portrait had been lacking, for it was 
Hill who made that portrait so speaking a likeness that 
the artist received warm and undue praise for the fidelity 
of his work. 

There is in St. Paul — a city of wealthy men — a man 



ST. PAUL — MINNEAPOLIS 217 

who is even wealthier than J. J. Hill. His name is Fred- 
erick Weyerheuser, and newspapers have a habit of 
speaking of him as the Lumber King. Mr. Weyerheuser 
does not court publicity, he shrinks from invitations to 
speak at public dinners. He has a press agent whose 
chief work it was for many years to keep his chief out 
of the columns of the newspapers. It is only within a 
comparatively short time that Weyerheuser consented 
to give his first interview to the press. 

He is quite typical of the conservatism of St. Paul. 
Minneapolis snaps its fingers at conservatism, social and 
business, and signs of progress. But Minneapolis mort- 
gages her downtown business property. St. Paul does 
not. The two towns are as difi^erent as if they were a 
thousand instead of but ten miles apart. And St. Paul 
believes that Minneapolis may do as she pleases. St. 
Paul has a reputation to preserve. She is the capital 
of the state of Minnesota and as capital her pride and 
her dignity are not slight. 

Perhaps it was that pride that made her set forth to 
build a capitol that should stand through the long years 
as the Bulfinch State House in Boston has stood through 
the long years — a monument to good taste, restraint, 
real beauty in architecture. She summoned one of her 
native sons to do the work. He was unhampered in its 
details. And when he was done and had placed it upon 
a sightly knoll he must have been proud of his handi- 
work. In years to come the Capitol of Minnesota may 
become quite as famous as the capitols of older states, 
and the name of Cass Gilbert, its architect, may be placed 
alongside of that of Bulfinch. 

St. Paul is hardly less proud of her Auditorium. It 
is really a remarkable building and perhaps the first 
theater in the land to be operated by a municipality, al- 
though we have a distinct feeling that the small city of 
Northampton, Mass., has also accomplished something 



2i8 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

of the sort. But the St. Paul Auditorium is hardly to 
be placed in the same class as any mere theater. It is 
a huge building although so cunningly constructed that 
within ten hours it can be changed from a compact the- 
ater into a great hall with some 10,000 seats. And this 
change can be effected, if necessary, without the slight- 
est disturbance to the audience. 

To this great hall come grand opera, well-famed ora- 
tors, conventions of state and national bodies, drama, 
concerts of every sort in great frequency and variety. 
Perhaps no entertainment that it houses, however, 
has keener interest for the entire city than the free con- 
certs that are given each winter. Last year there were 
five of these concerts, and it was soon found that the ' 
small-sized auditorium with its three thousand seats was 
too small. It became necessary to utilize the entire 
capacity of the structure. The concerts were immensely 
popular from the beginning. 

They were but typical of the high public spirit of the 
capital city of Minnesota, a spirit which showed itself in 
the early adoption of the commission form of city gov- 
ernment, in the establishment of playgrounds and mod- 
ern markets, in the buildings of the great public baths 
on Harriet island, in the development of a half hundred 
active and progressive forms of modern civic endeavor. 
St. Paul, with all her rare flavor of history and her great 
conservatism can well be reckoned in the list of the 
modern cities that form the gateways of what was once 
called the West and is today rapidly becoming an inte- 
gral part of the nation. 

The first time that we ever came into Minneapolis was 
at dusk of a July night two years ago. That is, it might 
have been dusk in theory. For while the clocks of the 
town spelled " eight," the northern day hung wonder- 
fully clear and wonderfully sharp — a twilight that was 



ST. PAUL — MINNEAPOLIS 219 

hardly done until well towards ten of the evening. We 
came out of the somewhat barn-like Union station, found 
an unpretentious cab and drove up Nicollet avenue toward 
our hotel. 

The initial impression that a city makes upon one is 
not easily forgotten. And the first impression that 
Nicollet avenue makes upon a first-comer to Minneapolis 
cannot easily be erased. It is with pleasure that a 
stranger notes that it has not been invaded by street 
railroad tracks. The chief shopping and show-street of 
the largest city of Minnesota thereby conveys a sense of 
breadth and roominess that the chief streets of some 
other fairly important American towns lack utterly. 
And we distinctly recall that upon that July night the 
cluster lights up and down Nicollet avenue each bore a 
great flower-box, warm and summerlike with the bright- 
ness of geraniums. In the windows of the large stores 
that lined the avenue were more window-boxes, up to 
their seventh and eighth floors. The entire effect was 
distinct and different from that of any other town that 
we have ever seen. It seemed as if Minneapolis at first 
sight typified the new America. 

Nor was that impression lessened when a little later 
we drove out in the softness of the summer night to see 
the residence streets of the city — quiet, shady streets 
that seem to have been stolen from older eastern towns ; 
drove into the parks, caught here and there the strains 
of bands, saw the canoes darting here and there and 
everywhere upon the surface of the park lakes. In 
other cities they have to build waterways within their 
parks and boast to you of the way in which they have 
done it. In Minneapolis they can have no such boast. 
For they have builded their parks around their lakes, 
and a man can have a sheet of water instead of green- 
sward at the door of his home if he so choose. Where 
a modern canoe shoots across the waters of Lakes Cal- 



220 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

houn or Harriet, the Indian once shot his birch-bark 
creation. There are some two hundred lakes in Henne- 
pin county. But the lake of all lakes — the joy of the 
residents of the Twin Cities for a day's outing, Minne- 
tonka — was the favored gathering spot for the council 
fires of the Indian tribes for many miles around. Do 
not forget that the Falls of St. Anthony were the mak- 
ing of Minneapolis — and you can go by trolley within 
the half -hour from the center of the city to the gentler 
Falls of Minnehaha and there recount once again the 
immortal romance of Hiawatha. 

Minneapolis has all but forgotten the Falls of St. 
Anthony — despite the fact that they were the very 
cause of her existence. They are hemmed in by great 
flouring-mills, great dusty, unceasing engines of indus- 
try with a capacity of some eighty thousand barrels a 
day, and even if you steal your way to them across one 
of the roadway bridges over the turbulent Mississippi 
you will find them lost beneath the artificial works that 
turn their energy to the aid of man. The roar of the 
great Falls of St. Anthony are the roar of the flouring- 
mills, their energy, the bread-stuflf of the nation. 

Minneapolis does not afifect to forget entirely her 
mother river. For a long time it irritated her that St. 
Paul should be regarded as the head of navigation upon 
the Mississippi, and within the past twenty years she 
has put the Federal government to much trouble and 
incidentally the expenditure of something over a million 
dollars, to make herself a maritime city. A ship-chan- 
nel has been dredged, locks put in, draws cut in the rail- 
road bridges but all apparently without a very definite 
purpose in mind — save possible holding her own in the 
expenditure of the annual rivers and harbors appropri- 
ation. For one can hardly imagine water commerce 
coming in great volume to the docks of Minneapolis, the 
one exclusive glory of St. Paul — passed long ago by her 



ST. PAUL — MINNEAPOLIS 221 

greatest rival in the commercial race of the Northwest 

— stolen from the older town. But one could hardly 
have driven out from the brisk little city of St. Paul 
forty years ago to the straggling mill village at the Falls 
of St. Anthony and imagined that in the second decade 
of the twentieth century it would have become a city of 
more than three hundred thousand souls. The men who 
are today active in the affairs of the city have seen her 
grow from a straggling town into a city of almost first 
rank. 

• Here was one of them who sat the other day in the 
well-ordered elegance of the Minneapolis Club — a struc- 
ture instantly comparable with the finest club-houses of 
New York or Boston or Philadelphia — who admitted 
that he had seen the town grow from eight thousand to 
over three hundred thousand population, the receipts of 
his own fine business increase from eighty-eight to 
twenty-two thousand dollars a day. But he was a mod- 
est man, far more modest than many of these western 
captains of industry, and he quickly turned the talk from 
himself and to the commercial importance of the town 
with which he was pressing forward. Still he delighted 
in statistics and the fact that Minneapolis " was doing a 
wholesale business of $300,000,000 a year " seemed to 
give him an immense and personal pride. 

But do not believe that Minneapolis is all commercial 

— and nothing else. A quick ride through those shaded 
streets and lake-filled parks will convince you that she 
is a home-city ; a cursory glance of the University of 
Minnesota, so cleverly located that she may share it with 
her rival twin, together with an inspection of her schools, 
large and small, would make you believe that she is a 
city that prides herself upon being well educated. The 
dominant strain of Norse blood that the Swedish immi- 
grants have been bringing her for more than half a cen- 
tury is a strain that calls for education — and makes the 



222 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

call in no uncertain fashion. And when you come to 
delve into the details of her living you will make sure 
that she is a well-governed city. She has not gone deeply 
into what she calls " the fads of municipal government " 
but she is a town which offers security and comfort, as 
well as pretty broad measure of opportunity, to her resi- 
dents. And in no better way can you gauge the sensible 
way in which she takes care of her residents than in the 
one item of the street railroad system. It has never 
been necessary for either St. Paul or Minneapolis to 
assume control, actual or subtle, over the street railroad 
property which they share. And yet each has a street 
railroad service far superior to that of most American 
towns — with the possible exception of Washington. 
The traction company seems to have assimilated much 
of the breadth of spirit that dominates the Twin Cities 
of the Northwest. 

Nor can you assume that Minneapolis is content to be 
merely commercially alive, well educated or efficiently 
governed. Down on one of the quiet business streets of 
the city is a printing-shop, so unique and so very dis- 
tinctive that it deserves a paragraph here and now. In 
that printing shop is published a trade paper of the mill- 
ing industry which has to make no apologies for its ex- 
istence, and a weekly newspaper called the Bellman. 
Some one is yet to write an appreciation of the new 
weekly press of America, the weekly press outside of 
New York, if you please, such publications as the Argo- 
naut of San Francisco ; the Mirror of St. Louis, the Dial 
of Chicago and the Minneapolis Bellman. The part 
that these papers are playing in the making of a broad 
and cultured America will perhaps never be known; but 
that it is a large part no one who reads them faithfully 
will ever doubt. The Bellman holds its own among 
this distinguished coterie. Its house is a fit temple for 
its soul, and you may gain a little insight into that soul 



ST. PAUL — MINNEAPOLIS 223 

when you are bidden to join its staff at one of its 
Thursday hmcheons at the dining-board of the printing- 
house — a fashion quickly and easily brought from Lon- 
don Punch halfway across the continent and into Min- 
neapolis. 

No American of taste or appreciation would ever go 
to Minneapolis and miss one wonderful shop there — ■ 
no huge box-like structure rearing itself from sidewalk 
edge and vulgarly proclaiming its wares through the 
brilliancy of immaculate windows of plate-glass, but a 
shadowy structure, set in a lawn and giving faint but 
unmistakable hints of the real treasures that it holds. 
For it is a rare shop, indeed, and a revelation to folk 
from the seaboard who may imagine that the interior 
of the land is an intellectual desolation. 

It may have been one of these who dined a little time 
ago at a house in one of these shaded streets of Min- 
neapolis. After dinner the talk drifted without apparent 
reason to painting, and the man from the seaboard found 
his host in sharp touch with many of the new pictures. 
Definitely the talk turned to Walter Graves, London's 
newest sensation among the portrait painters, and the 
possibilities of his succeeding Whistler. 

The Minneapolis man beckoned the guest into the hall, 
and pointed silently to a picture hung there. It was a 
splendid portrait of Whistler,* painted by Walter Graves. 

" I never expected to find a picture like that — out 
here," frankly stammered the man from the seaboard. 

" You will find many things here that you do not ex- 
pect," was all that the man from Minneapolis said. 

If a town that is scarce forty years old can accomplish 

* Since writing the above we have been led to believe, by a 
gentleman from Rochester that a picture of Whistler by Graves 
is no great prize. He says that he can buy them by the dozen at 
a certain London shop. Because we claim no wit as an art 
critic we take no sides in this matter. The facts are here. You 
may choose for yourself. E. H, 



224 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

these things, how long will it be before the older cities 
of the land wall have to look sharply as to their laurels? 
The new cities of America are to be a force in her in- 
tellectual progress not to be under-estimated or de- 
spised. 



14 
THE GATEWAY OF THE SOUTHWEST 

THERE are three great cities, or rather three 
groups of great cities, along the course of the 
Mississippi. To the north are St. Paul and Minneapolis, 
while far to the south is New Orleans, to which we will 
come in the due order of things. Between these St. 
Louis stands, close to the business center of the land. 
For nearly twenty miles she sprawls herself along the 
west bank of the Mississippi. Throughout her central 
portion she extends for a dozen miles straight back from 
her once busy levee. She is a great city, a very great 
city, in wealth, in industry, in resource. And yet she 
is a rather unimpressive city to the eye, at first sight 
and at last. 

It takes even a seasoned traveler some time to get used 
to that. If he dreams of St. Louis as a French city and 
preserving something of the French atmosphere, as do 
New Orleans and Quebec, he is doomed to utter dis- 
appointment. Save for a few tatterdemalion cottages 
down in Carondolet, at the south tip of the town, there 
is no trace of the builders of the city to which they gave 
the name of one of their kings. And if he has heard of 
the great German population and dreams of great sum- 
mer-gardens, of winter-gardens, too, with huge bands and 
huge steins, he is doomed to no less disappointment. 
For that sort of thing you go to Milwaukee. St. Louis 
has as many Germans as that brisk Wisconsin city, and 
the largest brewery in the world, but she has never spe- 
cialized in beer-gardens. She is old and yet you could 

225 



226 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

hardly call her quaint. There are rows of small houses 
in her older streets, their green blinds tightly closed as if 
seemingly to escape the almost endless bath of soot and 
cinders that falls upon them, and the flat-bottomed 
steamboats still are fastened at the wharf-boats along 
the levee. But these make a pitiful showing nowadays 
when your mind compares them with the tales of ante- 
bellum days when there were so many of them that they 
could only put the noses of their bows against the levees. 
But tradition still rules the hearts of the rivermen, and 
the Mississippi steamboat has lost none of those fan- 
tastics of naval architecture that has endeared it to 
every writer from Mark Twain down to the present day. 

The streets aroundabout the levee are mean and dirty, 
and nowadays as silent as the Sabbath. Those convivial 
resorts, the Widow's Vow and the Boatman's Thirst 
have long since ceased to exist. As this is being written 
the Southern Hotel has closed its doors. Cobwebs are 
growing through its wonderful office, and the glorious 
marble stair up which a regiment might have marched is 
silent, save for the occasional halting steps of a watch- 
man. The old Planters' — than which there was no more 
famous hostelry in the Mississippi valley, unless we 
choose to except the St. Charles down at New Orleans 
— is long since gone, torn away twenty years ago to 
make room for a new Planters', which has already be- 
gun to get grimy and aged. The Lindell went its way a 
dozen years ago. The St. Louis of the riverman is 
dead. They are tearing away the old warehouses from 
the levees, and no one looks at the Mississippi any more 
save when it gets upon one of its annual rampages 
and makes itself a yellow sea. 

But do not for an instant think that St. Louis herself 
is dead. There are other hotels, and far finer than those 
of the war-times and the river-trade. And you have 
only to walk a few squares back from the levee to find 




H 



ST. LOUIS 227 

industry flourishing once again, solid squares of solid 
buildings, grimy, commercial, uncompromising, but each 
representing commerce. St. Louis is still the very center 
of the world to the great Southwest and to her it pays 
its tribute, in demands for merchandise of every sort. 
That is why she builds shoe-stores and dry-goods stores 
and wholesale stores of almost every other conceivable 
sort, and builds them for eight or ten or twelve stories 
in height, closely huddled together, even through unim- 
portant side streets. That is her reason for existence to- 
day — when the river-trade, her first reason for growth 
and expansion, is dead. But the railroad is a living, 
vital force, when the rivers are frozen and dead, and 
railroads slip out from St. Louis in every possible direc- 
tion. Their rails are glistening from traffic, and there 
at the city from whence they radiate Commerce sits 
enthroned. 

For you must look upon St. Louis, yesterday and to- 
day, as essentially a commercial city. She is not a 
cultured city, although she has an excellent press, in- 
cluding a weekly newspaper of more than ordinary dis- 
tinction. Still you will find few real bookshops in all 
her many miles of streets, she has never leaned to fads 
or cults of any sort ; but she measures the percentage 
which a business dollar will earn with a delightful ac- 
curacy. She is a commercial city. That is why she is 
to the casual traveler an unimpressive city, although we 
think that her lack of a dignified main street in her busi- 
ness section is responsible for much of this impression. 
In other years Broadway — Fifth street upon her city 
plan and a fearfully long thoroughfare running paral- 
lel to the river — ranked almost as a main street and had 
some dignity, if little beauty. But today St. Louis, like 
so many other of our American towns, is restless and 
she has slipped back and away from Broadway, leaving 
that thoroughfare somewhat forlorn and deserted and 



228 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

herself without a single great business thoroughfare — • 
such as Market street, San Francisco or State street, 
Chicago. Her downtown streets are narrow and as 
much alike as peas in a pod. 

And yet even a casual traveler can find much to in- 
terest him in St. Louis. Let him start his inspection of 
the levee, let romance and sentiment and memory work 
within his mind. Let his fancy see the riverboats and 
then he, himself, inspect one of them. Here is one of 
them, gay in her ginger-bready architecture. Her 
stacks rise high above her " Texas " but they are placed 
ahead of her wheel-house, a fancy peculiar to the old 
naval architects along the Mississippi. She is driven 
by sidewheels and if our casual traveler goes upon her 
he will find that each sidewheel is driven by a separate 
engine, a marvelous affair painted in reds and blues and 
yellows. With one engine going ahead and the other 
reversed a really capable Mississippi pilot — and who 
shall doubt that a Mississippi river pilot, even in these 
decadent days, is ever anything less than capable — 
could send the boat spinning like a top upon the yellow 
stream. That pretty trick would hardly be possible with 
one of the flat-bottomed stern wheel boats, and there 
still are hundreds of these upon the Father of Wa- 
ters and his tributaries, moving slowly and serenely up 
and down and all with a mighty splashing of dirty 
water. 

If you are a casual traveler and upon your first visit 
to the Mississippi valley, you will make a mental reserva- 
tion to ride upon one of the old boats before you leave 
St. Louis. They may not be there so very many more 
years. The steel barges have begun to show themselves, 
and commerce is looking inquiringly at the idle stream 
to see if it cannot be brought into real efficiency as a 
transportation agent. And before you leave that levee, 
with the grass growing up between its ancient stones, 



ST. LOUIS 229 

you will find a very small and a very dirty sidewalk that 
leads from it up into and upon the great Eads bridge. 

St. Louis does not think very much of the Eads bridge 
these days. Yet it was only a few years ago that it 
was bragging about that wonderful conception of the 
engineer — who had finally spanned the lordly Missis- 
sippi and right at his chief city. But other bridges have 
come, two huge ungainly railroad structures to the north 
and a public bridge to the south — that is, it will be a 
public bridge if the voters of St. Louis ever cease quar- 
reling about it. At the present time it is hardly a bridge, 
only a great span over the water and for long months 
absolutely unprovided with approaches because the tax- 
payers of St. Louis refuse to vote the funds for its com- 
pletion. So it is that the Eads bridge is today but a 
single agency out of three or four for the spanning of 
the river ; it, too, has grown grimy in forty years and the 
railroad travelers who come across through its lower 
deck only remember that from it there leads under the 
heart of the city of St. Louis one of the smokiest rail- 
road tunnels in existence — and that is saying much. 

But the fact remains that it was the first structure to 
span the river, and to end the importunities of the un- 
speakable ferry. And today it is, with all of its grime, 
the one impressive feature of downtown St. Louis. It 
is the only wagonway that leads from the sovereign 
state of Illinois into the sovereign city of St. Louis. 
Across its upper deck passes at all hours of the day and 
far into the night a silent parade of trolley cars, mule 
teams, automobiles, farm trucks, folk of every sort and 
description, on foot. It is as interesting as London 
bridge and a far finer piece of architecture. But the 
modern St. Louis has all but forgotten it, save when it 
chooses to take a motor run across the Illinois prairies. 

The casual traveler finally turns his back upon the 



230 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

river and its oldest bridge, although not without some 
regret if any real sentiment dwells within him. He 
threads his way through the narrow streets of downtown 
St. Louis and finally he enters the oldest residential part, 
the streets still narrow but the houses of rather a fine 
sort, many of them transformed into small shops or given 
these days to lodgers. They are of a type somewhat 
peculiar to the town. They were built high and rather 
narrow and as a rule set upon a terrace and detached. 
Builded of brick, the fancy of those old-time architects 
seemed to turn almost invariably to a fagade of marble, 
an unblushing and unashamed veneer to the street, with 
the side walls humble and honest in dark red brick. 
Steps and lintels were of marble or what must have been 
marble in the beginning. A Philadelphia housewife would 
quail beneath the steady bath of smoke and cinders that 
falls upon St. Louis. 

There are many thousands of these red-brick and 
white-marble houses, finally important cross streets, such 
as Jefi'erson and Grand, and then you come into the 
newer St. Louis — a residential district of which any 
city might well be proud. In the newer St. Louis the 
houses are more modern and more attractive perhaps, 
due partly to the fact that they are farther away from 
the river and the great factories and railroad yards that 
line it. You can trace the varying fads in American 
house architecture in layers as you go back street by 
street in the new St. Louis — Norman, Italian Renais- 
sance, American Colonial, Elizabethan — all like the 
slices in a fat layer-cake. Some of the more preten- 
tious of these houses are grouped in great parks or reser- 
vations which give to the public streets by entrance gates 
and are known as Westminster place, or Vandeventer 
place, or the like. They form a most charming feature 
of the planning of St. Louis, and one almost as distinc- 
tive as the tidy alleys which act as serviceways to all 



ST. LOUIS 231 

the houses. The houses themselves are ahiiost invariably 
set in lawns, although there are many fine apartments 
and apartment hotels. The fearful monotony of the 
side street of New York or Philadelphia does not exist 
within the town. 

At the rear of these fine streets of the newer St. 
Louis stands the chief park of the town, not very dis- 
tinctive and famed chiefly as the site of the biggest 
World's Fair that was ever held, " considerably larger 
than that Chicago affair," your loyal resident will tell 
you. Our individual fancy rather turns to Tower Grove 
Park and the Botanical Gardens just adjoining it. 
Tower Grove is in no very attractive section of St. 
Louis, and as an example of landscape gardening it is 
rather lugubrious, little groups of stones from the old 
Southern Hotel, which was burned many years ago and 
was a fearful tragedy, being set here and there. 
But intangibly it breathes the spirit of St. Louis, and hard 
by is the Botanical Gardens that Plenry Shaw gave to the 
city in which he was for so many years a dominating 
figure. And for even a casual traveler to go to St. Louis 
and never see Shaw's Gardens is almost inconceivable. 

In the first place, it is an excellent collection of plants 
and of trees and of exceeding interest to those folk who 
let their tastes carry them that way. And in the second 
place, Henry Shaw was so typical of the old St. Louis 
that you must stop for a moment and remember him. 
You must think of the steady purpose of the man 
visiting all the great gardens of Europe and then seek- 
ing to create one that should outrank all of them, in 
the mud-bog of St. Louis. For the St. Louis of war- 
times, the St. Louis to which Shaw gave his benefaction 
was little more than a bog. And Americans of those 
days laughed at parks. True there was Fairmount Park 
in Philadelphia, but the Fairmount Park of those days 
was a fantastic idea and hardly to be compared with the 



232 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

Fairmount Park of today. Henry Shaw went much 
farther than the banks of the Schuylkill, although he 
must have known and appreciated John Bartram's his- 
toric gardens there. 

Shaw was only forty years of age when he retired 
from business. He had saved through his keen business 
acumen and a decent sense of thrift, a quarter of a 
million dollars — a tremendous fortune for those days. 
He was quite frank in saying that he thought that $250,- 
000 was all that a man could honestly earn or honestly 
possess, and he retired to enjoy his fortune as best it 
might please him to do. He traveled far and wide 
through Europe, and upon one of the earliest of those 
trips he visited the World's Fair of 1851, at the Crystal . 
Palace, London ; one of the very first of these inter- ^ 
national exhibitions. He was impressed not so much by 
the exhibits as by the fine park in which the Crystal 
Palace stood. A little later he was a guest at Chatsworth 
House, that splendid English home given by William the 
Conqueror to his natural son, William Peveril, and he 
became a frequent visitor at Kew Gardens. It was at 
that time he decided to make a botanical garden out of 
the place which he had just purchased outside of St. 
Louis. 

Henry Shaw must have remembered his boyhood days 
in St. Louis and the wonderful garden of Madame 
Rosalie Saugrain. In those earlier days St. Louis was 
small enough in population but large enough in the 
material for social enjoyment. The French element was 
still dominant, although Madame Saugrain was com- 
paratively a newcomer, an accomplished lady who had 
brought the manners and tastes of Paris into the wilds of 
western America. Her garden, which was then in open 
country beyond the struggling town, was close to what 
is today Seventh street, St. Louis. Great skyscrapers 
and solid warehouses have sprung up where formerly 




A luxurious home in the newer St. Louis 



ST. LOUIS 233 

Madame's roses and hollyhocks bloomed, and one would 
have to go weary blocks to find a spear of grass, unless 
within some public park. 

But Shaw's Gardens still exist, although their founder 
lived to a ripe old age and has now been dead a quarter 
of a century. Older folk of St. Louis remember him 
distinctly, a vigorous and seemingly lonely man, un- 
married, but who seemed to be content to live alone in 
his great house in the Gardens, giving a loving and a per- 
sonal care to his flowers and then, as dusk came on, 
invariably sitting in his room and reading far into the 
night. They will show you his will when you go to the 
museum in the Gardens, a curious old document, keenly 
prepared and devising to the remaining members of 
his family, servants and intimates, everything from im- 
mensely valuable real estate in the very heart of St. 
Louis down to the port and sherry from his cellars. 
But the part that interested St. Louis most was that part 
which gave the Gardens to the town, although not with- 
out restrictions. And the old Missouri town made 
Shaw's Gardens quite as much a part of its existence as 
its County Fair. 

The St. Louis Fair was a real institution. There have 
been far greater shows of the kind in our land, but per- 
haps none that ever entered more thoroughly into the 
hearts of the folk to whom it catered. Every one in 
St. Louis used to go to the Fair. It had a social status 
quite its own. When, after the hot and gruelling sum- 
mer which causes all St. Louis folk who possibly can 
to flee to the ocean or to the mountains, they came home 
again in the joys of Indian summer there was the Fair 
— up under the trees of Grand avenue in the north part 
of the town — to serve for a getting together once again. 
It had served that way since long before wartime. And 
with it ran that mighty social bulwark of St. Louis, the 
Procession of the Veiled Prophet. One night in " Fair 



234 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

Week " — locally known as " Big Thursday " — was an- 
nually given to this pageant, frankly modeled upon the 
Mardi Gras festivities at New Orleans. Through the 
streets of the town the pageant rolled its triumphal 
course, all St. Louis came out to see it, and afterwards 
there was a ball. To be bidden to that ball was the 
social recognition that the city gave you. 

But in 1904 there came that greater fair — the Louis- 
iana Purchase Exposition, to which the world was bid- 
den. It was a really great fair and it has left a per- 
manent impress upon the town in the form of a fine Art 
Gallery and the splendid group of buildings at the west 
edge of the city which are being devoted to the uses of 
Washington University. But the big fair spelled the 
doom of the smaller. The town had grown out around 
its grounds and they were no longer in the country. 
So the career of the old St. Louis Fair ended — bril- 
liantly in that not-to-be-forgotten exposition. Although 
some attempts have recently been made to reestablish 
it in another part of the town, the older folk of St. Louis 
shake their heads. They very well know that you can- 
not bring the old days back by the mere waving of a 
wand. 

Upon a crisp October evening, the Veiled Prophet 
still makes his way through the narrow streets of the 
town. The preparations for his coming are hedged 
about with greatest secrecy, and the young girls of 
St. Louis grow expectant just as their mothers and 
their grandmothers before them used to grow expectant 
when October came close at hand. At last, expectancy 
rewarded — out of the unknown an engraved summons 
to attend the court of a single night — with the engraved 
summons some souvenir of no slight worth ; the prophet's 
favor is a generous one. 

Absurd, you say? Not a bit of it. It is a pity that 
we do not have more of it in our land. We have been 



ST. LOUIS 235 

rather busy grubbing; given ourselves rather too much 
to utility and efficiency, to the sordid business of merely 
making money. A Veiled Prophet is a good thing for 
a town, a Mardi Gras a tonic. It is an idea that is 
spreading across America, and America is profiting by 
it. 

This is a personality sketch of St, Louis and not a 
guide-book. If it were the latter, it would recount the 
superb commercial position of the city, each of the 
bulwarks of its financial fortresses. The river-trade is 
dead indeed ; even the most optimistic of those who are 
most anxious to see it revived doubt, in their heart of 
hearts, if ever it can be revived. But commerce is not 
dead at St. Louis. As St. Paul and Minneapolis are 
gateways to the Northwest remember that she is one of 
the great gateways to the Southwest. To the man in 
Arkansas or Oklahoma or Texas she is another New 
York ; she stands to him as London stands to the folk 
of the English counties. And this relation she capital- 
izes and so grows rich. She is solid and substantial — 
the old French town of the yesterdays has taken her per- 
manent place among the leading cities of America. 



15 

THE OLD FRENCH LADY OF THE RIVERBANK 

AT the bend of the river she stands — this drowsy 
old French lady of the long ago. They have 
called her the Crescent City. But the Mississippi makes 
more than a single turn around the wide-spreading town. 
And the results are most puzzling, even to those steady- 
minded folk who assert that they are direction-wise. 
In New Orleans, east seems west and north seems south. 
It must almost be that the Father of Rivers reverses all 
the laws of Mother Nature and runs his course up- 
stream. 

New Orleans is upon the east bank of the Mississippi. 
All the guide-books will tell you that. But in the morn- 
ing the sun arises from over across the river, and in the 
cool of evening his reddish radiance is dying over Lake 
Ponchartrain, directly east from the river — at least, 
so your direction-wise intelligence seems to tell you. 
But east is east and west is west and Old Sol has made 
such a habit of rising and setting these many thousand 
years that his reliability is not to be trusted. As to the re- 
liablity of the Father of Waters — there is quite another 
matter. 

Truth to tell, the Mississippi river is probably the 
most utterly unreliable thing within the North American 
continent. He has shifted his course so many times 
within the brief century that the white-skinned men 
have known him, that the oldest of them have lost all 
trace of his original course. And so to steer a vessel 
up and down the stream is a doubly difficult art. The 

^36 



NEW ORLEANS 237 

pilot does not merely have to know his steering-marks 
— the range between that point and this, the thrust of 
some hidden and fearfully dangerous reef, the advantage 
to be gained between eddies and currents for easy run- 
ning — he has to learn the entire thing anew each time 
he brings a craft up or down the river. Mark Twain 
has long since immortalized the ample genius of the 
Mississippi pilots. The stories of the river's unreli- 
ability, of its constant tendency to change its channel 
are apocryphal — almost as old as the oldest of the houses 
of old New Orleans. And this is not the story of the 
river. 

Yet it must not be forgotten that the river almost is 
New Orleans, that from the beginning it has been the 
source of the French lady's strength and prosperity. 
Before there was even thought of a city the river was 
there — pouring its yellow flood down from an vmknown 
land to the great gulf. Bienville, the real founder of 
New Orleans, saw with the prophetic sight of a really 
great thinker what even a river that came to the sea 
from an unexplored land might mean in years to come 
to the city of his creation. His prophecy was right. 
When the river, with the traffic upon its bosom, has 
prospered, New Orleans has prospered. And in the lean 
years when the river traffic has dwindled. New Orleans 
has felt the loss in her every fiber. There are old- 
timers in the city who shake their heads when they tell 
you of the fat river-boats crowding in at the levee, of the 
clipper-ships and the newer steam-propelled craft at the 
deeper docks, of the crowds around the old St. Louis 
and the St. Charles Hotels, the congested narrow streets, 
the halcyon days when the markets of the two greatest 
nations in the world halted on the cotton news from 
Factors Row. And New Orleans awaits the opening 
of the Panama canal with something like feverish an- 
ticipation, for she feels that this mighty nick finally cut 



238 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

into the thin neck of the American continents, her 
wharves will again be crowded with shipping — this time 
with a variety of craft plying to and from the strange 
ports of the Pacific. So much does her river still mean 
to her. 

Factors Row still stands, rusty and somewhat grimed. 
No longer is it consequential in the markets of the 
world. In fact, to put a bald truth baldly, no longer is 
New Orleans of supreme consequence in the cotton prob- 
lem of all nations. A great cotton shipping port she 
still is and will long remain. But the multiplication of 
railroad points and the rapid development of such newer 
cotton ports as Galveston, to make a single instance, 
have all worked against her preeminence. 

This is not a story of the commercial importance of 
New Orleans, either. There are plenty who are willing 
to tell that story, with all of its romantic traditions of the 
past and its brilliant prophecies for the future. This is 
the story of the New Orleans of today, the city who with 
an almost reverential respect for the Past and its monu- 
ments still holds her doors open to the Present and its 
wonders. 

Of the Past one may know at every turn. North of 
Canal street — that broad thoroughfare which ranks as 
a dividing path with Market street in San Francisco — 
the city has changed but little since the Civil War. 
South of Canal — still called the " new " part of the 
city — there has been some really modern development. 
Prosperous looking skyscrapers have lifted their lordly 
heads above the narrow streets and the compactly built 
" squares " which they encompass ; there are several 
modern hotels with all the momentary glory of artificial 
marbles and chromatic frescoes, department stores with 
show windows as brave and gay as any of those in New 
York or Chicago or Boston. But even if the narrow 
streets were to be widened, New Orleans would never 



NEW ORLEANS 239 

look like Indianapolis or Kansas City or St. Paul — 
any of the typical cities of the so-called Middle West. 
Too many of her stout old structures of the fifties and 
the sixties still remain. And hung upon these, uncom- 
promising and triumphant, are the galleries. 

The galleries of New Orleans ! They are perhaps the 
most typical of the outward expressions of a town whose 
personality is as distinct as that of Boston or Charles- 
ton or San Francisco. They must have been master 
workmen whose fingers and whose ancient forges worked 
those delicate and lacelike traceries. And it has been 
many thankful generations who have praised the prac- 
tical side of their handicraft. For in the long hot sum- 
mer months of New Orleans these galleries furnish a 
shade that is a delight and a comfort. On rainy days 
they are arcades keeping dry the sidewalks of the heart 
of the town. And from the offices within, the galler- 
ies, their rails lined with growing things, are veri- 
table triumphs. Once in a great while some one will 
rise up and suggest that they be abolished — that 
they are old-fashioned and have long since served 
their full purpose. That some one is generally a smart 
shopkeeper who has drifted down from one of these 
upstart cities from the North or East. But New Or- 
leans is smarter still. She well knows the commercial 
value of her personality. There are newer cities and 
showier within the radius of a single night's ride upon 
a fast train. But where one man comes to one of these, 
a dozen alight at the old French town by the bend of the 
yellow river. 

" Give J a few French restaurants, some fame 

for its cocktails or its gin-fizzes — just as New Orleans 
has — and I will bring a dozen big new factories here 
within the next three years," said the secretary of the 
Chamber of Commerce of a thriving Texas town the 
other day. He knew whereof he spake. And now, we 



240 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

shall know whereof we speak. We shall give a moment 
of attention to the little restaurants and the gin-fizzes. 

Let the gin-fizzes come first, for they are nearly as 
characteristic of the old town as her galleries! You 
will find their chief habitat just across a narrow alley 
from the St. Charles Hotel. There is a long bar on the 
one side of the room, upon which stand great piles of 
ice-bound southern oysters — twelve months of the year, 
for New Orleans never reads an " R " in or out of her 
oyster-eating calendar. But any bar may bring forth 
oysters, and only one bar in the world brings forth the 
real New Orleans gin-fizz. Two enterprising young 
men stand behind the bar-keepers in a perpetual shaking 
of the fizzes. If it is tantalizing to shake that whereof 
you do not taste, they show it not. And in the hours of 
rush traffic there are six of the non-bar-keeping bar- 
tenders who give the correct amount of ague to New 
Orleans' most delectable beverage. A hustler from North 
or East would put in electric shakers instanter — a 
thousand or is it ten thousand revolutions to the minute? 
He would brag of his electric shakers and the New 
Orleans gin-fizz would be dead — forever. Romance 
and an electric shaker cannot go hand in hand. 

"The ingredients?" you breathlessly interrupt. 
" The manner of the mixing? " 

Bless your heart, if the Gin Fizz House published its 
close-held secret to the world, it would lose its chief ex- 
cuse for existence and then become an ordinary drink- 
ing-place. As it is, it holds its head above the real 
variety of saloons, even above the polished mahogany 
bar of the aristocratic hotel across the narrow street. 
For its product, if delightful, is still gentle, although 
insidious, perhaps. It is largely milk and barely gin. 
You can drink it by the barrel without the slightest 
jarring of your faculties. And it is rumored that some 
of the men of New Orleans use it as a breakfast-food. 



NEW ORLEANS 241 

From the Gin Fizz House to the Absinthe House is a 
long way, — in more meanings than one. The Absinthe 
House is hardly less famed, but in these days when 
drinking has largely gone out of fashion and worm- 
wood is under the particular ban of the United States 
statutes, it is largely a relic of the past. It stands in the 
heart of the old French town and before we come to 
its broad portal, let us study the fascinating quarter in 
which we are to find it. 

We have already spoken of Canal street, so broad in 
contradistinction to the very narrow streets of the rest 
of the older parts of the town, that one can almost see 
the narrow water-filled ditch that once traversed it, as 
the dividing line of the city. South of Canal street, the 
so-called American portion of the city, with many affec- 
tations of modernity — north of that thoroughfare — 
curiously enough the down-stream side — the French 
quarter, architecturally and romantically the most fasci- 
nating section of any large city of the United States. 
The very names of its streets — Chartres, Royal, Bour- 
bon, Burgundy, Dauphine, St. Louis — quicken antici- 
pation. And anticipation is not dulled when one comes 
to see the great somber houses with their mysterious 
and moth-eaten courtyards and the interesting folk who 
dwell within them. 

We choose Royal street, heading straight away from 
Canal street as if in shrinking horror of electric signs 
and moving-picture theaters. In a single square they 
are behind and forgotten and, if it were not for the trol- 
ley cars and the smartly dressed French girls, we might 
be walking in Yesterday. The side streets groan under 
the same ugly, heavy patterns of Belgian block pave- 
ment that have done service for nearly a century. Orig- 
inally the blocks — brought long years ago as ballast in 
the ships from Europe — were in a pretty pattern, laid 
diagonally. But heavy traffic and the soft sub-strata of 



242 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

the river-bank town have long since worked sad havoc 
with the old pavements. And a new city administra- 
tion has finally begun to replace them with the very com- 
fortable but utterly unsentimental asphalt. 

Here is the Absinthe House, worth but a single glance, 
for it has descended to the estate of an ordinary corner 
saloon. Only ordinary corner saloons are not ordinar- 
ily housed in structures of this sort. You can see houses 
like this in the south of France and in Spain — so I 
am told. For below Canal street is both French and 
Spanish. Remember, if you please, that the French 
of the Southland shared the same hard fate of their 
countrymen in that far northern valley of the great St. 
Lawrence — neglect. The French are the most loyal 
people on earth. Their fidelity to their language and 
their customs for nearly two centuries proves that. 
That faith, steadfast through the tragedy of the indif- 
ference and neglect of their mother country, doubly 
proves it. And the only difference between the French- 
man of Quebec and the Frenchman of New Orleans 
was that in the South the Spaniard was injected into the 
problem. But the Frenchman in the South was not less 
loyal than his fellow-countryman of the North. A dis- 
solute king sitting in the wreck of his great family in 
the suburbs of Paris might barter away the title of his 
lands, but no Louis could ever trade away the loyalty 
of the older French of New Orleans to their land and 
its institutions. In such a faith was the French quar- 
ter of the city born. In such faith has it survived, these 
many years. And perhaps the very greatest episodes in 
the history of the city were in those twenty days of 
November, 1803, when the French flag displaced the 
Spanish in the old Place d'Armes, to be replaced only 
by the strange banner of a newborn nation which was 
given the opportunity of working out the destiny of the 
new France. 



NEW ORLEANS " 243 

So it was the Spaniard who took his part in the shap- 
ing of the French quarter of New Orleans. You can 
see the impress of his architects in the stout old houses 
that were built after two disastrous and wide-spread 
fires in the closing years of the eighteenth century — 
even in the great lion of the town; the Cabildo which 
rises from what was formerly the Place d'Armes and 
is today Jackson square. And the old Absinthe House, 
with its curiously wrought and half-covered courtyard 
is one of these old-time Spanish houses. 

Now forget about the absinthe — as the rest of the 
French folk of the land are beginning to forget it — 
and turn your attention to the courtyards. In another 
old Southern city — Charleston — the oldest houses shut 
the glories of their lovely-aging gardens from the sight 
of vulgar passers-by upon the street by means of un- 
compromising high fences. The old houses of New Or- 
leans do more. Their gardens are shielded from the 
crowded, noisy, horrid streets by the houses themselves. 
And he who runs through those crowded, noisy, horrid 
streets, must really walk, for only so will he catch brief 
glimpses of the glories of those fading courtyard 
gardens. 

Sometimes, if you have the courage of your convic- 
tions and the proper fashion of seizing opportunity by 
the throat you may wander into one of the tunnel-like 
gateways of one of these very old houses. No one will 
halt you. 

Here it is — old France in new America. The 
tunnel-like way from the street is shady and cool. From 
it leads a stair to the right and the upper floor of the 
house, a stair up which a regiment might have walked, 
and down which the old figure of a Balzac might descend 
this moment without ever a single jarring upon your 
soul. The stair ends in a great oval hall, whose scarlet 
paper has long since faded but still remains a memory 



244 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

of the glories of the days that were. The carved en- 
tablatures over the doors, the bravado of cornice and 
rosette where the plaster has not finally fallen, proclaim 
the former grandeur of this apartment. And in some 
former day a great chandelier must have hung from the 
center of its graceful ceiling. Today — some one of 
the neighboring antique stores has reaped its reward, 
and a candle set in a wall-lantern is its sole illumination. 
A shabby room will not bear the glories of a gay chan- 
delier. And the old Frenchman and his wife who live 
in the place have all but forgotten. They have a parrot 
and a sewing-machine and what are the glories of the 
past to them? 

Of course, such a house must have its courtyard. 
And if the huge copper-bound tank is dry, and the water 
has not forced its way through the battered fountain 
these many years, if the old exquisite tiles of the house 
long since went to form the roof of the new garage of 
some smart new American place up the river — the mag- 
nolia still blossoms magnificently among the decay, and 
Madame's skill with her jessamine and her geraniums 
would confound the imported tricks of those English 
gardeners in the elaborate new places. 

Here then is the old France in the new land — the 
priceless treasure that New Orleans wears at her very 
heart. And here in the very heart of that heart is an 
ugly old building boarded up by offensively brilliant ad- 
vertising signs. 

An ugly old building did we say, with rough glance 
at its rusty fagades? Can one be young and beautiful 
forever? Rusty and beautiful — oh no, do not scorn 
the old St. Louis Hotel for following the most normal 
of all the laws of Nature. For within this moldering 
and once magnificent tavern history was made. In one 
of its ancient rooms a President of the United States 
was unmade, while in another chamber human life was 



NEW ORLEANS 245 

bought and sold with no more concern than the old 
Creole lady on the far corner shows when she sells you 
the little statues of the Blessed Virgin. 

These wonders are still to be seen — for the asking. 
The concierge of the old hotel is a courteous lady who 
with her servant dwells in the two most habitable of its 
remaining rooms. There is no use knocking at the hotel 
door for she is very, very deaf indeed, poor lady. But 
if you will brave a stern " No Admittance " sign and 
ascend the graceful winding stair for a single flight — 
such a stair as has rarely come to our sight — you will 
find her — ready and willing. One by one she shows 
you the rooms, faded and disreputable, for the hotel is 
in a fearful state of disrepair. The plaster is falling 
here and there, and where it still adheres to the lath the 
old-time paper hangs in long shreds, like giant stalac- 
tites, from the ceiling. Once, for a decade in the " late 
eighties," an effort was made to revive the hotel and its 
former glories — a desperate and a hopeless effort — 
and the pitiful " innovations " of that regime still show. 
But when you close your eyes you do not see the St. 
Louis Hotel of that decade, but rather in those won- 
derful twenty years before the coming of the cruel war. 
In those days New Orleans was the gayest city in the 
new world, uptilting its saucy nose at such heavy eastern 
towns as New York or Boston. Its wharves were 
crowded with the ships of the world, the river-boat cap- 
tains fought for the opportunity of bringing the mere 
noses of their craft against ^the overcrowded levee. 
Cotton — it was the greatest thing of the world. New 
Orleans was cotton and cotton was the king of the world. 

No wonder then that the St. Louis Hotel could say 
when it was new, that it had the finest ballrooms in the 
world. They still show them to you, in piecemeal, for 
they were long since cut up into separate rooms. The 
great rotunda was ruined by a temporary floor at the 



246 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

time the state of Louisiana bought the old hotel for a 
capitol, and used the rotunda for its fiery Senate ses- 
sions. 

All these things the concierge will relate to you — • 
and more. Then she takes you down the old main- 
stair, gently lest its rotting treads and risers should 
crumble under too stout foot-falls. Into the cavernous 
bottom of the rotunda she leads you. It is encumbered 
with the steam-pipes of that after era, blocked with rub- 
bish, very dark withal. The concierge, with a fine sense 
of the dramatic, catches up a bit of newspaper, lights it» 
thrusts it ahead as a lighted torch. 

" The old slave mart," she says, in a well-trained, 
stage whisper, and thrusts the blazing paper up at full 
arm's length. As the torch goes higher, her voice goes 
lower : " Beyond the auction block, the slaves' prison." 

As a matter of real fact, the " slaves' prison " is prob- 
ably nothing more or less than the negro quarters that 
every oldtime southern hotel used to provide for the 
slaves of its planter patrons. But the concierge does 
not overlook dramatic possibilities. And she is both too 
deaf and too much a lady to be contradicted. She has 
given you full value for the handful of pennies she ex- 
pects from you. And as for you — a feeling of some- 
thing like indignation wells within you that the city of 
New Orleans has permitted the stoutly built old hotel 
to fall into such ruin. In an era which is doing much 
to preserve the monuments of the earlier America, it 
has been overlooked. 

Such resentment softens a little further down. You 
are in Jackson square now — the Place d'Armes of the 
old French days — and facing there the three great lions 
that have stood confronting that open space since almost 
the beginning of New Orleans. The great cathedral 
flanked by the Cabilda and the Presbytery is not, of 
Itself, particularly beautiful or impressive. But it is 



NEW ORLEANS 247 

interestng to remember that within it on a memoralile 
occasion Andrew Jackson sat at mass — interesting be- 
cause he had just fought the battle of New Orleans and 
ended the Second War with England. And the Te 
Deiini that went up at that time was truly a thankful 
one. The Cabilda and the Presbytery, invested as they 
are with rare historical interest, are more worth while. 

But to our mind the chief delight of Jackson square 
are the two long red-brick buildings that completely fill 
the north and south sides of that delectable retreat. In 
themselves these old fellows are not architecturally 
important, although by close inspection you may find in 
the traceries of their gallery rails the initials of the 
wife of the Spanish grandee — Madama de Pontalba — 
historically they are not distinguished, unless count the 
fact that in one of them dwelt Jenny Lind upon the occa- 
sion of a not-to-be- forgotten engagement in New Or- 
leans — but as the sides of what is perhaps the most 
delightful square in the entire Southland they are most 
satisfying. Jackson square has fallen from its high 
estate. Its gardens were once set out in formal fashion 
for the elect of New Orleans, nowadays they are visited 
by swarms of the cheaper French and Italian lodgers of 
the neighborhood, and scrawny felines from the old 
Pontalba buildings use it as a congregating place. But, 
even in decadent days, its fascination is none the less. 

Beyond Jackson square rests the French market, the 
very index to all that New Orleans' love of good eating 
that has become so closely linked with the city. The 
market-scheme of the city as this is being written is 
being greatly revised. Up to the present time the mar- 
ket-men have been autocrats. The grocers of the city 
have been forbidden to sell fresh fruits or vegetables; 
if a retailer be audacious enough to wish to set out with 
a private market, he must be a certain considerable 
number of squares distant from a public institution — 



248 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

and pay to the city a heavy license fee as penalty for 
his audacity. Nor is that all. The consumer is for- 
bidden to purchase direct from the producer, even 
though the producer's wagon be backed up against the 
market curb in most inviting fashion. New Orleans 
recognizes the middleman and protects him — or has 
protected him until the present time. Even peddlers 
have been barred from hawking their wares through her 
streets until noon — when the public markets close and 
the housewives have practically completed their pur- 
chases for the day. 

But — banish the thoughts of the markets as economic 
problems, cease puzzling your blessed brains with that 
eternal problem of the cost-of-living. Consider the 
French market as a truly delectable spot. Go to it early 
in the morning, when the sun is beginning to poke his 
way down into the narrow streets and the shadows are 
heavy under the galleries. Breakfast at the hotel? 
Not a bit of it. 

You take your coffee and doughnuts alongside the 
market-men — at long and immaculate counters in the 
market-house. And when you are done you will take 
your oath that you have never before tasted coffee. 
The coffee-man bends over you — he is a coffee-man 
descended from coffee-men, for these stalls of the fa- 
mous old markets are almost priceless heritages that 
descend from generation to generation. In these days 
they never go out of a single family. 

"Cafe lait?" says the coffee-man. 

You nod assent. 

Two long-spouted cans descend upon your cup. From 
one the coffee, from the other creamy milk come simul- 
taneously, with a skill that comes of long years of prac- 
tice on the part of the coffee-man. 

That is all — cafe lait and doughnuts. They make 
just as good doughnuts in Boston, but New England has 



NEW ORLEANS 249 

never known the joys of cafe lait. If it had, it would 
never return to its oldtime coffee habits. And the older 
markets of Boston do not see the fine ladies of the town 
coming to them on Sunday morning, after mass, negro 
servants behind, to do their marketing, themselves. 

Hours of joy in this market — the food capital of a 
rich land of milk and honey. After those hours of joy 
— breakfast at the Madame's. 

The Madame began — no one knows just how many 
years ago — • by serving an eleven o'clock breakfast to 
the market-men, skilled in food as purveyors as most 
critical of the food they eat. The Madame realized that 
problem — and met it. So well did she meet it that the 
fame of her cookery spread outside the confines of the 
market-houses, and city folk and tourists began drifting 
to her table. In a few years she had established an insti- 
tution. And today her breakfast is as much a part of 
New Orleans as the old City Hall or the new Court 
House. 

She has been dead several years — dear old gas- 
tronomic French lady — but her institution, after the 
fashion of some institutions, lives after her. It still 
stands at the edge of the market and it still serves one 
meal each day — the traditional breakfast. It is sad to 
relate that it has become a little commercialized — they 
sell souvenir spoons and cook-books — but you can shut 
your eyes to these and still see the place in all of its 
glories. 

A long, low room at the back of and above a little 
saloon, reached from the side-door of the saloon by a 
turning and rickety stair. A meagerly equipped table 
in the long, low room, from which a few steps lead up 
to a smoky but immensely clean kitchen. From that 
kitchen - — odors. Odors ? What a name for incense, 
the promise of preparation. You sometimes catch 
£:limpses of busy women, fat and uncorseted. Cooks? 



250 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

Perish the words. These are artists, if artists have ever 
really been. 

Finally — and upon the stroke of eleven — the break- 
fast. It shall not be described here in intimate detail 
for you, dear reader, will not be sitting at the Madame's 
hospitable table as you read these lines. It is enough 
for you to know that the liver is unsurpassable and the 
coffee — the coffee gets its flavor from an adroit sweet- 
ening of cognac and of sugar. What matter the souvenirs 
now ? The breakfast has lost none of its savor through 
the passing of the years. 

For here is New Orleans where it seems impossible 
to get a poor meal. There is many and many an interior 
city of size and pretentious marbleized and flunkeyized 
hotels of which that may not be said. But in New Or- 
leans an appreciation of good cookery is an appreci- 
ation of the art of a real profession. And of her res- 
taurants there is an infinite variety — La Louisiane, 
Galatoire's, Antoine's, Begue's, Brasco's — the list runs 
far too long to be printed here. Nor does the space of 
this page permit a recountal of the dishes themselves — 
the world-famed gumbos, the crawfish bisque, the red- 
snapper stuffed with oysters, the crabs and the shrimps. 
And lest we should be fairly suspected of trying to emu- 
late a cook-book, turn your back upon the fine little 
restaurants, where noisy orchestras and unspeakable 
cabarets have not yet dared to enter, and see still a little 
more of the streets of the old French quarter. 

More courtyards, more old houses, a venerable hall 
now occupied by a sisterhood of the Roman church but 
formerly gay with the " quadroon balls " which gave 
spicy romance to all this quarter. And here, rising high 
above the narrow thrust of Bourbon street, the French 
Opera, for be it remembered that New Orleans had her 
opera house firmly established when New York still 
regarded hers as a dubious experiment. To come into 



NEW ORLEANS 251 

the old opera house, builded after the impressive fashion 
of architects of another time, with its real horseshoe 
and its five great tiers rising within it — is again to see 
the old New Orleans living in the new. It is to see the 
exclusive Creoles — perhaps the most exclusive folk in 
all America — half showing themselves in the shadowy 
recesses of their boxes. And to be in that venerable 
structure upon the night of Mardi Gras is to stand upon 
the threshold of a fairy world. 

It is not meet that the details of the greatest annual 
carnival that America has ever known should be fully 
described here. It is enough here and now to say that 
New Orleans merely exists between these great parties 
at the eve of each Lent ; that nearly a twelvemonth is 
given to preparations for the Mardi Gras. One festa 
is hardly done before plans are being made for the next 
— rumor runs slyly up and down the narrow streets, 
costumiers are being pledged to inviolate secrecy, strange 
preparatory sounds emerge from supposedly abandoned 
sheds and houses, rumors multiply, the air is surcharged 
with secrecy. Finally the night of nights. Canal street, 
which every loyal resident of New Orleans believes to 
be the finest parade street in all the w^orld, is ablaze with 
the incandescence of electricity, a-jam with humanity. 
For a week the trains have been bringing the folk in 
from half-a-dozen neighboring states by the tens of 
thousands. There is not a single parish of venerable 
Louisiana without representation ; and more than a fair 
sprinkling of tourists from the North and from over- 
seas. 

Finally — after Expectancy has almost given the right 
hand to Doubt, the fanfare of trumpets, the outriders 
of Parade. From somewhere has come Rex and The 
Queen and all the Great and all the Hilariously Funny 
and the rest besides. From the supposedly abandoned 



252 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

sheds and houses, from the costumiers? Do not dare 
to venture that, oh uncanny and worldly minded soul ! 
Fairyland never emerged from old sheds, a King may 
not even dream of a costumier. From thin air, from 
the seventh sense, the land of the Mysterious, this King 
and Queen and all their cavalcade. Then, too, the Royal 
Palace — the historic French Opera House floored and 
transformed for a night. More lights, more color, the 
culinary products of the best chefs of all the land work- 
ing under a stupendous energy, music, dancing, white 
shirts, white shoulders, gayety, beauty — for tomorrow 
is Ash Wednesday, and Catholic New Orleans takes its 
Lent as seriously as it gaily takes the joyousness of its 
carnivals. 

For three-quarters of a century these carnivals have 
been the outspoken frivols of the old French lady by the 
bend of the yellow river. In all that time the carnival 
has progressed until it today is the outward expression 
of the joyousness of a joyous city. In all that time did 
we say ? There was an interregnum — the Four Years. 
In the Four Years the little French restaurants were 
closed, the lights at the Opera extinguished — there 
could be no Carnival, for Tragedy sat upon the South- 
land. And in a great house in Lafayette square there 
sat a man from Massachusetts who ruled with more zeal 
than kindness. And that man New Orleans has not 
forgotten — not even in the half -century that has all 
but healed the sores of the Four Years. 

" It is funny," you begin, " that New Orleans should 
make so much of the Boston Club, when Butler came 
from — " 

It is not funny. You saw the Boston Club which 
vies for social supremacy in the old French city with 
the Pickwick Club, there in Canal street, at least you 
saw its fine old white house in that broad thoroughfare. 



NEW ORLEANS 253 

It is not funny. Your New Orleans man tells you — 
courteously but clearly. 

" We named our club from that game," he says. 

" Boston was a fine game, sir," he adds. " And that 
without ever a thought of that town up in Massachu- 
setts." 

From a carnival to a graveyard is a far cry indeed, 
and yet the cemeteries of New Orleans are as distinc- 
tive of her as her Mardi Gras festivities. We have 
spoken of the river and the great part it has played in 
the history of the city that rests so close to its treacher- 
ous shore. And it is that very treacherous shore that 
makes it so exceedingly difficult to arrange a cemetery 
in the soft and marshy soil on which the city is built. 

So it is that the New Orleans' cemeteries are veritable 
cities of the dead. For the bodies that are buried 
within them are placed above the ground, not under them. 
Tombs and mausoleums are the rule, not the exception, 
and where a family is not prosperous enough to own even 
the simplest of tombs, it will probably join with other 
families or with some association in the ownership of a 
house in the city of the dead. And for those who have 
not even this opportunity there are the ovens. 

The ovens are built in the great walls that encompass 
the older cemeteries and make them seem like crum- 
bling fortresses. Four tiers high, each oven large enough 
to accommodate a coffin — the sealed fronts bear the 
epitaphs of those who have known the New Orleans of 
other days. A motley company they are — poets, 
pirates, judges, planters, soldiers, priests — around them 
the scarred regiments of those who lived their lives with- 
out the haunting touch of Fame upon the shoulder — no 
one will even venture a guess as to the number that have 
been laid away within a single one of these cities. 

And wdien you are done with seeing the graves of 



254 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

Jean Lafitte or Dominique You — why is it that the 
average mind pricks up with a more quickened interest 
at the tomb of a pirate than at a preacher — the Por- 
tuguese sexton begins phicking at the loosely laid bricks 
of one of these abandoned ovens. Abandoned? He 
lifts out a skull, this twentieth century Yorick and bids 
you peep through the aperture. Like the concierge of 
the old hotel, looking is made more easy from a blazing 
folding copy of the morning Picayune. In the place 
are seemingly countless skulls, with lesser bones. 

" He had good teeth, this fellow," coughs the Por- 
tuguese. 

You do not answer. Finally — 
"Do they bury all of them this way?" 
Not at first, you find. The strict burial laws of New 
Orleans demand that the body shall be carefully sealed 
and kept within the oven for at least a year. After that 
the sexton may open the place, burn the coffin and thrust 
the bones into the rear of the place. And New Orleans 
can see nothing unusual in the custom. 

" New Orleans is more like the old San Francisco 
than any other community I have ever seen," says the 
Californian. Not in any architectural sense and of 
course two cities could hardly be further apart in loca- 
tion than the city in the flat marshlands whose trees are 
below the level of the yellow river at flood-tide, and the 
new city that rises on mountainous slopes from the 
clear waters of the Golden Gate. But there is an in- 
tangible likeness about New Orleans and his city that 
was but never again can be, that strikes to the soul of 
the Californian. Perhaps he has come to know some- 
thing of the real life of the Creoles — of those strange 
folk who even today can say that they have lived long 
lives in New Orleans and never gone south of Canal 
street. Perhaps he has met some of that little company 



NEW ORLEANS 255 

of old French gentlemen who keep their faded black 
suits in as trim condition as their own good manners, 
and who scrimp and save through years and months 
that they may visit — not Chicago or New York — but 
Paris, Paris the unutterable and the unforgettable. 

" New Orleans is more like the old San Francisco 
than any other community that I have ever seen," re- 
iterates the Californian. " It is more like the old than 
the new San Francisco can ever become." 

And there is a moral in that which the San Franciscan 
speaks. In the twinkling of an eye the old San Fran- 
cisco disappeared — forever. Slowly, but surely, the 
old New Orleans is beginning to fade away. There 
are indubitable signs of this already. When it shall 
have gone, our last stronghold of old French customs 
and manners shall have gone. One of the most fasci- 
nating chapters in the story of our Southland will have 
been closed. 



i6 

THE CITY OF THE LITTLE SQUARES 

IN after years, you will like to think of it as the City 
of the Little Squares. After all the other memories 
of San Antonio are gone — the narrow streets twisting 
and turning their tortuous ways through the very heart 
of the old town, the missions strung out along the Con- 
cepcion road like faded and broken bits of bric-a-brac, 
the brave and militant show of arsenal and fort — then 
shall the fragrance of those open plazas long remain. 
The Military Plaza, with its great bulk of a City Hall 
facing it, the Main Plaza, where the grave towers of 
the little cathedral look down upon the palm-trees and 
the beggars, the newer, open squares — always plazas 
in San Antonio — and then, best of all, the Alamo Plaza, 
with that squat namesake structure facing it — the lion 
of a town of many lions. These open places are the 
distinctive features of the oldest and the best of the 
Texas towns. They lend to it the Latin air that renders 
it different from most other cities in America. They 
help to make San Antonio seem far more like Europe 
than America. 

To this old town come the Texans, always in great 
numbers for it is their great magnet — the focusing 
point that has drawn them and before them, their fathers, 
their grandfathers and their great-grandfathers — far 
reaching generations of Texans who have gone before. 
For here is the distinct play-ground of the Lone Star 
State. Its other cities are attractive enough in their 
several ways, but at the best their fame is distinctly com- 

256 



SAN ANTONIO 257 

mercial — Fort Worth as a packing-house town, Dallas 
as a distributing point for great wholesale enterprises, 
Houston as a banking center, Galveston as the great 
water-gate of Texas and the second greatest ocean port 
of the whole land. San Antonio is none of these things. 
While the last census showed her to be the largest of all 
Texas cities in point of population, it is said by her jeal- 
ous rivals and it probably is true, that nearly half of that 
population is composed of Mexicans ; and here is a 
part of our blessed land where the Mexican, like his 
dollar, must be accepted at far less than his nominal 
value. 

But if it were not for these Mexicans — that delicate 
strain of the fine old Spanish blood that still runs in 
her veins — San Antonio would have lost much of her 
naive charm many years ago. The touch of the old 
grandees is everywhere laid upon the city. In the 
narrow streets, the architecture of the solid stone 
structures that crowd in upon them in a tremen- 
dously neighborly fashion shows the touch of the 
Spaniard in every corner; it appears again and 
again — in the iron traceries of some high-sprung fence 
or second-story balcony rail, or perhaps in the linea- 
ments of some snug little church, half hidden in a quiet 
place. The Cathedral of San Fernando, standing there 
in the Main Plaza, looks as if it might have been stolen 
from the old city of Mexico and moved bodily north 
without ever having even disturbed its fortress-like 
walls or the crude frescoes of its sanctuary. The four 
missions out along the Concepcion road are direct fruit 
of Spanish days — and remember that each of the little 
squares of San Antonio is a plaza, so dear to the heart 
of a Latin when he comes to build a real city. 

But the impress of those troublous years when Spain, 
far-seeing and in her golden age, was dreaming of 
Texas as a mighty principality, is not alone in the 



258 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

wood and the stone of San Antonio, not even in the delir- 
ious riot of narrow streets and little squares. The im- 
press of a Latin nation still not three hundred miles 
distant, is in the bronzed faces of the Mexicans who 
fill her streets Some of them are the old men who sit 
emotionless hours in the hot sun in the narrow highways, 
and vend their unspeakable sweets, or who come to af- 
fluence perhaps and maintain the marketing of tamales 
and chile con came at one of the many little outdoor 
stands that line the business streets of San Antonio, 
and make it possible for a stranger to eat a full-course 
dinner, if he will, without passing indoors. These are 
the Mexicans of San Antonio who are most in evidence 
— the men still affecting in careless grandeur their 
steeple-crowned, broad-brimmed hats, even if the rest 
of their clothing remain in the docile humility of blue 
jeans ; the women scorning such humility and running to 
the brilliancy of red and yellow velvets, although of late 
years the glories of the American-made hat have begun 
to tell sadly upon the preeminence of the mantilla. 
These are the Mexicans who dominate the streets of 
the older part of the town — they are something more 
than dominant factors in the West end of the city, long 
ago known as the Chihuahua quarter. 

But there is another sort — less often seen upon the 
streets of San Antonio. This sort is the Mexican of 
class, who has come within recent years in increasing 
numbers to dwell in a city where unassuming soldiery 
afford more real protection for him and for his than 
do all of the brilliantly uniformed regiments with which 
Diaz once illuminated his gay capital. Since our neigh- 
bor to the south entered fully upon its troublous season 
these refugees have multiplied. You could see for 
yourself any time within the past two years sleeping 
cars come up from Laredo filled with nervous women 
and puzzled children. These were the families of pros- 



SAN ANTONIO 259 

peroiis citizens from the south of Mexico, who in their 
hearts showed no contempt for the comfortable protec- 
tion of the American flag. 

A man plucks you by the sleeve as you are passing 
through the corridors of one of the great modern hotels 
of San Antonio, hotels which, by the way, have been 
builded with the profits of the cattle-trade in Texas. 

" That homhre," he says, " he is the uncle of Madero." 

But a mere uncle of the former Mexican President 
hardly counts in a town which has the reputation of 
fairly breeding revolutions for the sister land to the 
south ; whose streets seem to whisper of rumors and 
counter-rumors, the vague details of plot and counter- 
plot. There is a whole street down in the southwestern 
corner of San Antonio lined with neat white houses, and 
the town will know it for many years as " Revolutionary 
Row." For in the first of these houses General Ber- 
nardo Reyes lived, and in the second of them this former 
governor of Nuevo Leon planned his coup d'etat by 
which he was to march into Mexico City with all the 
glory of the Latin, bands playing, flags flying, a display 
of showy regimentals. Reyes had read English history, 
and he remembered that one Prince Charlie had at- 
tempted something of the very sort. In the long run 
the difference was merely that Prince Charlie succeeded 
while Reyes landed in a dirty prison in Mexico City. 

Here then is the very incubator of Mexican revolu- 
tion. There is not an hour in San Antonio when the 
secret agents of the United States and all the govern- 
ments and near-governments of our southern neighbor 
are not fairly swarming in the town and alive to their 
responsibilities. The border is again passing through 
historic days — and it fully realizes that. It is twenty- 
four hours of steady riding from San Antonio over to 
El Paso — the queer little city under the shadows 



26o PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

of the mountains and perched hard against the " silver 
Rio Grande," this last often so indistinguishable that a 
young American lieutenant marched his men right over 
and into Mexican soil one day without knowing the dif- 
ference — until he was confronted by the angry citizens 
of Ciudad Juarez and an affaire nationale almost created. 
Every mile of that tedious trip trouble is in the air. 

And yet El Paso does not often take the situation very 
seriously. It is almost an old story, and if the revolu- 
tionists will only be kind enough to point their guns 
away from the U. S. A. they can blaze away as long as 
they like and the ammunition lasts. In fact El Paso 
feels that as long as the Mexican frontier battles have 
proper stage management they are first-rate advertising 
attractions for the town — quite discounting mere Mardi 
Gras or Portola or flower celebrations, Frontier or 
Round-up Days, as well as its own simpler joys of 
horse-racing and bull-fighting. On battle-days El Paso 
can ascend to its house-tops and get a rare thrill. But 
when the atrocious marksmanship of ill-trained Mexi- 
cans does its worst, and a few stray bullets go whistling 
straight across upon American soil, El Paso grows 
angry. It demands of Washington if it realizes that 
the U. S. A. is being bombarded - — the fun of fighting 
dies out in a moment. 

San Antonio is a safer breeding ground for insur- 
rection than is El Paso. For one thing it is out of care- 
less rifle-shot, and for another — well at El Paso some 
Mexican troopers might come right across the silver 
Rio Grande in a dry season, never wetting their feet or 
dreaming that they were crossing the majestic river 
boundary, and pick up a few erring citizens without 
much effort. There is a risk at El Paso that is not 
present in San Antonio. Hence the bigger town — in 
its very atmosphere emitting a friendly comfort toward 
plottings and plannings — is chosen. 



SAN ANTONIO 261 

You wish to come closer to the inner heart of the 
town. Very well then, your guide leads you to the In- 
ternational Club which perches between the narrow and 
important thoroughfare of Commerce street and one of 
the interminable windings of the gentle San Antonio 
river. It was on the roof of the International Club that 
Secretary Root was once given a famous dinner. It is 
an institution frankly given " to the encouragement of 
a friendly feeling between Mexico^ and the United 
States." It is something more than that, however. It 
is a refuge and sort of harbor for storm-tossed hearts 
and weary minds that perforce must do their thinking 
in a tongue that, to us, is alien. Most of the time the 
newspaper men of the town sit in the rear room of the 
club and look down across the tiny river on to the quiet 
grounds of an oldtime monastery. They play their pool 
and dominoes — two arts that seem hopelessly wedded 
throughout all Texas. The International Club nods. 

Suddenly a tall bronzed man, with nnistachios, per- 
haps a little group of Mexicans will come into the place. 
The pool and the dominoes stop short. There are 
whisperings, flashy papers from Mexico city are sud- 
denly produced, maps are studied. One man has " in- 
side information " from Washington, another lays claim 
to mysterious knowledge up from the President's palace 
of the southern capital, perhaps from the constitutional- 
ists along the frontier. There is a great deal of talk, 
much mystery — after all, not much real information. 

But when some real situation does develop, San An- 
tonio has glorious little thrills. To be the incubator of 
revolution is almost as exciting as to have bull-fights 
or a suburban battle-field, the treasures for which San 
Antonio cannot easily forgive her rival. El Paso. Each 
new plot-hatching of this sort gives the big Texas town 
fresh thrills. Gossip is revived in the hotel lobbies and 
restaurants, the cool and lofty rooms of the Interna- 



262 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

tional Club are filled with whisperers in an alien tongue, 
out at Fort Sam Houston the cavalrymen rise in their 
stirrups at the prospect of some real excitement. San 
Antonio does not want war — of course not — but if it 
must have war — well it is already prepared for the 
shock. And it talks of little else. 

" Within ten years the United States will have an- 
nexed Mexico and San Antonio will have become a 
second Chicago," says one citizen in his enthusiasm. 
" And what a Chicago — railroads, manufactories and 
the best climate of any great city in the world." 

Even in war-times your true San Antonian cannot 
forget one of the chief assets of his lovely town. 

The others say little. One is a junior officer from out 
at the post. He can say nothing. But he is hoping. 
There is not much for an army man in inaction and the 
best of drills are not like the real thing. For him 
again — the old slogan — "a fight or a frolic." 

Not all of San Antonio is Spanish — although very 
little of it is negro. An astonishing proportion of its 
population is of German descent. These are largely 
gathered in the east end of the town, that which was for- 
merly called the Alamo quarter, and like all Germans 
they hke their beer. The brewing industry is one of 
the great businesses of San Antonio — and the most 
famous of all these breweries is the smallest of them. 
On our first trip to " San Antone " we heard about that 
beer; all the way down through Texas — " the most won- 
derful brew in the entire land." 

The active force of this particular Los Angeles brew- 
ery consisted of but one man, the old German who 
carried his recipe with him in the top of his head, 
and who had carefully kept it there throughout the 
years. In the cellar of the little brewery he made 
the beer, upstairs and in the garden he served it. 



SAN ANTONIO 263 

In the mornings he worked at his cellar kettles, in the 
late afternoon and the early evening he stood behind 
his bar awaiting his patrons. If they wished to sit out 
in the shady garden they must serve themselves. There 
were no waiters in the place. If a man could not walk 
straight up to the bar and get his beer he was in no 
condition for it. The old German was as proud of the 
respectability of his place as he was of the secret recipe 
for the beer, which had been handed down in his family 
from generation to generation. 

Only once was that secret given — and then after 
much tribulation and in great confidence to an agent of 
the government. But he had his reward. For the 
government at Washington in its turn pronounced his 
the purest beer in all the land. Men then came to him 
with proposals that he place it upon the market. They 
talked to him in a tempting way about the profits in the 
business, but he shook his head. His beer was never to 
be taken from the brewery. It was a rule from which 
San Antonians and tourists alike had tried to swerve 
him, to no purpose. Of course, every rule has its ex- 
ceptions but there was only a single exception to this. 
Each Saturday night Mr. Degen used to send a small 
keg over with his compliments to a boyhood friend — 
he believed that friendship of a certain sort can break 
all rules and precedents. 

All the way down through dry Texas we smacked our 
lips at the thought of Degen's beer. Before we had 
been in San Antonio a dozen hours we found our way 
to the brewery; in a quiet side street down back of the 
historic Alamo. But we had no beer. 

The brewer was dead. In a neighboring street his 
friends were quietly gathering for his funeral, and ru- 
mor was rife as to whether or no he had confided his 
recipe to his sons. It was a great funeral, according to 
the local newspapers, the greatest in the recent history 



264 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

of San Antonio. It was a tribute from the chief citizens 
of a town to a simple man who had lived his life simply 
and honestly — who in his quiet way had builded up one 
of the most distinctive institutions of the place. 

Rumor was soon satisfied. The secret of the recipe 
of the beer had not died. In a few days the brisk little 
brewery in the side street was in action once again. 
The stout Germans in their shirt-sleeves were again 
tramping with their paddles round and round the great 
vat while their foaming product was being handed to 
patrons in the adjoining room. But, alas, the traditions 
of the founder are gone. The beer is now bottled and 
sold on the market — in a little while is will be embla- 
zoned in electric lights along the main streets of New 
York and Chicago. We are in a commercial and a ma- 
terial age. Even in San Antonio they are threatening 
to widen Commerce street — that narrow but immensely 
distinctive thoroughfare that cuts through the heart of 
the town — threatening, also, to tear down the old con- 
vent walls next the Alamo and there erect a modern 
park and monument. By the time these things are done 
and San Antonio is thoroughly " modernized " she will 
be ready for an awakening — she is apt to find with 
her naive charm gone the golden flood of tourists has 
ceased to stop within her walls. Truly she will have 
killed the goose that laid the golden egg. 

You will like to think of it as the City of the Little 
Squares. After all the other memories of San Antonio 
are gone you will revert to these — gay open places, 
filled with palms and other tropical growths, and flanked 
by the crumbling architecture of yesterday elbowing the 
newer constructions of today. You will like to think 
of those squares in the sunny daytime with the deep 
shadows running aslant across the faces, there is de- 
light in the memory of them at eventide, when the clus- 



SAN ANTONIO 265 

ter lights burn brightly and the narrow sidewalks are 
filled with gaily dressed crowds, typical Mexicans, tall 
Texans down from the ranches for a really good time 
in " old San Antone," natives of the cosmopolitan town, 
tourists of every sort and description. Then comes the 
hour when the crowds are gone, the town asleep, its 
noisy clocks speaking midnight hours to mere empti- 
ness — San Antonio breathes heavily, dreams of the days 
when she was a Spanish town of no slight importance, 
and then looks forward to the morrow. She believes that 
her golden age is not yet come. Her plans for the fu- 
ture are ambitious, her opportunity is yet to come. In 
so far as those dreams involve the passing of the old 
in San Antonio and the coming of the new, God grant 
that they will never come true. 



17 

THE AMERICAN PARIS 

A GREAT bronze arch spans Seventeenth street and 
bids you welcome to Denver. For the capital of 
Colorado seems only second to the Federal capital as 
a mecca for American tourists. She has advertised her 
charms, her climate, her super-marvelous scenery clev- 
erly and generously. The response must be all that she 
could possibly wish. All summer and late into the au- 
tumn her long stone station is crowded with travelers 
— she is the focal point of those who come to Colorado 
and who find it the ideal summer playground of Amer- 
ica. 

To that great section known as the Middle West, be- 
ginning at an imaginary line drawn from Chicago south 
through St. Louis and so to the Gulf, there is hardly a 
resort that can even rival Colorado in popular favor. 
Take Kansas, for a single instance. Kansas comes 
scurrying up into the Colorado mountains every blessed 
summer. It grows fretfully hot down in the Missouri 
bottoms by the latter part of July, and the Kansans be- 
gin to take advantage of the low rates up to Denver 
and Colorado Springs and Pueblo. And with the Kan- 
sans come a pretty good smattering of the folk of the 
rest of the Middle West. They crowd the trains out 
of Omaha and Kansas City night after night ; at dawn 
they come trooping out through the portal of the Denver 
Union station and pass underneath that bronze arch of 
welcome. 

They find a clean and altogether fascinating city 
266 



DENVER 267 

awaiting them, a city solidly and substantially built. 
Eighteen years ago Denver decided that she must dis- 
continue the use of wooden buildings within her limits. 
She came to an expensive and full realization of that. 
For Colorado is an arid country nominally, and water 
is a precious commodity within her boundaries. The 
irrigation ditches are familiar parts of the landscapes 
and ever present needs of her cities. To put out fire 
takes water, and Denver sensibly begins her water econ- 
omy by demanding that every structure that is within 
her be built of brick or stone or concrete. And yet her 
parks are a constant reproach to towns within the re- 
gions of bountiful water. They are wonderfully green, 
belying that arid country, and the water that goes to 
make them green comes from the fastnesses of the won- 
derful Rockies, a full hundred miles away. 

The brick buildings make for a substantial city, but 
Denver herself has a solidity that you do not often see 
in a Western city. Giant office buildings in her chief 
streets do not often shoulder against ill-kempt open lots, 
have as unbidden neighbors mere shanties or hovels. 
Moreover, she is not a " one-street town." Sixteenth 
and Seventeenth streets vie for supremacy — the one 
with the great retail establishments, the other with the 
hotels, banks and railroad offices. There are other 
streets of business importance — no one street not even 
as a z'ia sacre of this bustling town for the best of her 
homes. 

The Paris of America, is what she likes to call herself 
and when you come to know her, the comparison is not 
bad. But Paris, with all of her charms, has not the lo- 
cation of Denver — upon the crest of a rolling, treeless 
plain, with the Rocky Mountains, jagged and snow- 
capped, to serve as a garden-wall. Belasco might have 
staged Denver — and then been proud of his work. 



268 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

But hers is a solitary grandeur and a very great isola- 
tion. She is isolated agriculturally and industrially, and 
before long we shall see how difficult all this makes it 
for her commercial interests. It makes things difficult 
in her social life, and Denver must, and does, have a 
keen social life. 

The isolation and the altitude, constantly tending to 
make humans nervous and unstrung, demands amuse- 
ment, self-created amusement of necessity. If Denver 
is not amused she quarrels ; you can see that in her un- 
settled and troubled politics, and her endless battles with 
the railroads. So she is wiser when she laughs and it 
is that faculty of much laughing, much fun, expressed 
in a variety of amusements that have led magazine 
writers to call the town, the Paris of America, although 
there is little about her, save the broad streets and her 
many open squares and parks to suggest the real Paris. 
But, on the other hand, the Seine is hardly to be com- 
pared to the majesty of the backbone of the continent, 
Denver's greatest glory. 

In winter Denver society has a fixed program. On 
Monday night it religiously attends the Broadway Thea- 
ter, a playhouse which on at least one night of the week 
blossoms out as gayly as the Metropolitan Opera House. 
Denver assumes to prove herself the Paris of America 
by the gayness of its gowns and its hats and a Denver res- 
taurant on Monday night after the play only seems like 
a bit of upper Broadway, Manhattan, transplanted. On 
Tuesday afternoon society attends the vaudeville at the 
Orpheum and perhaps the Auditorium or one of the lesser 
theaters that night. By Wednesday evening at the latest 
the somewhat meager theater possibilities of the place 
are exhausted and one wealthy man from New York 
who went out there used to go to bed on Wednesday 
until Monday, when the dramatic program began anew. 



DENVER 269 

For him it was either bed or the " movies," and he 
seemed to prefer bed. 

In summer the Broadway is closed, and Elitch's Gar- 
dens, one of the distinctive features of the town, takes 
its place as a Monday rendezvous. It is a gay place, 
Elitch's, with a quaint foreign touch. A cozy theater 
stands in the middle of an apple orchard — part of the 
one-time farm of the proprietress' father. Good taste 
and the delicate skill of architect and landscape gardener 
have gone hand in hand for its charm. You go out there 
and dine leisurely, and then you cross the long shady 
paths under the apples to the theater. And even if the 
play in that tiny playhouse were not all that might be 
expected — although the best of actors play upon its 
stage — one would be in a broadly generous mood, at 
having dined and spent the evening in so completely 
charming a spot. 

But the Parisians of Colorado are not blind to the 
summer joys of the wonderful country that lies around- 
about them. They quickly become mountaineers, in the 
full sense of the word. They can ride — and read rid- 
ing not as merely cantering in the park but as sitting all 
day in the saddle of some cranky broncho — they can 
build fires, cook and live in the open. A Denver so- 
ciety woman is as particular about her khakias as about 
her evening frocks. When these folk, experienced and 
well-schooled, go off up into the great hills, they are the 
envy of all the tourists. 

Do not forget that we started by showing Denver as 
a mecca for these folk. When you come to see how 
very well the Paris of America takes care of them you 
do not wonder that they return to her — many times ; 
that they are with her more or less the entire year round. 
Her hotels are big and they are exceedingly well run. 
There are more side trips than a tourist can take, us- 



270 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

ing the city as a base of operations, than a man might 
physically use in a month. The most of these run off 
into the mountains that have been standing sentinel over 
Denver since first she was born. In a day you can leave 
the bustling capital town, pass the foothills of the Rock- 
ies and climb fourteen thousand feet aloft to the 
very backbone of the continent. Indeed, it seems to be 
the very roof of the world when you stand on a sentinel 
peak and look upon timber line two thousand feet below, 
where the trees in another of Nature's great tragedies 
finally cease their vain attempts to climb the mountain 
tops. 

A man recommended one of the mountain trips over 
a wonderfully constructed railroad, poetically called the 
" Switzerland Trail." 

" You'll like that trip," he said, with the enthusiasm 
of the real Denverite. " It's wonderful, and such a rail- 
road ! Why, there are thirty-two tunnels between here 
and the divide." 

The tourist to whom this suggestion was made looked 
up — great scorn upon his countenance. 

" That doesn't hit me," he growled, " not even a little 
bit. I live in New York — live in Harlem, to be more 
like it, and work down in Wall street — use the subway 
twelve times a week. I don't have to come to Colorado 
to ride in tunnels." 

Tourists form no small portion of Denver industry. 
She has restaurants and souvenir shops, three to a block; 
seemingly enough high-class hotels for a town three 
times her size. Yet the restaurants and the hotels 
are always filled, the little shops smile in the sunshine 
of brisk prosperity. And as for " rubberneck wagons," 
Denver has as many as New York or Washington. They 
are omnipresent. The drivers take you to the top of the 
park system, to the Cheesman Memorial, to see the view. 



DENVER 271 

All the time you are letting your eyes revel in the glories 
of those great treeless mountains, the megaphone man 
is dinning into your ears the excellence of his company's 
trips in Colorado Springs, in Manitou, in Salt Lake City. 
He assumes that you are a tourist and that you will have 
never had enough. 

Tourists become a prosperous industry in a town that 
has no particular manufacturing importance. Great idle 
plants, the busy smelters of other days, bespeak the truth 
of that statement. Denver, as far as she has any com- 
mercial importance, is a distributing center. Her re- 
tail shops are excellent and her wholesale trade extends 
over a dozen great western states. Her banks are 
powers, her influence long reaching. But she is not an 
industrial city. 

That has worried her very much, is still a matter of 
grave concern to her business men. Their quarrels with 
the railroads have been many and varied. Denver re- 
alizes, although she rarely confesses it, that she has dis- 
advantages of location. These same mountains that the 
tourist comes to love from the bottom of his heart, just 
as the Coloradians have loved them all these years, are 
a real wall hemming her in, barriers to the growth of 
their capital. When the Union Pacific — the first of 
all the transcontinental railroads — was built through to 
the coast it was forced, by the mountains, to carry its 
line far to the north — a bitter pill to the ambitious town 
that was just then beginning to come into its own. Den- 
ver sought reprisals by building the narrow-gauge Den- 
ver & Rio Grande, a most remarkable feat of railroad 
engineering; bending far to the south and then to the 
north and west through the narrow niches of the high 
mountains. But hardly had the Denver & Rio Grande 
assumed any real importance in a commercial fashion 
and the mistake of its first narrow-guage tracks cor- 



272 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

rected, before it was joined at Pueblo by direct routes 
to the east and Denver was again isolated from through 
transcontinental traffic. She was then and still is reached 
by side-lines. 

This was a source of constant aggravation to the man 
who was until his death two or three years ago, Denver's 
first citizen — David H. Moffat. Mr. Moffat's interest 
and pride in the town were surpassing. He had grown 
up with it — in the later years of his life he used to 
boast that he once had promoted its literature, for he 
had come to Denver when it was a mere struggling min- 
ing-camp as a peddler, selling to the miners who wanted 
to write home a piece of paper and a stamped envelope, 
for five cents. 

Moffat saw that a number of important lines were 
making Denver their western terminal — particularly 
the Burlington and the Kansas stems of the Union Pa- 
cific and the Rock Island. He felt that he might pick 
up traffic from these roads and carry it straight over the 
mountains to Salt Lake City, a railroad center suffer- 
ing the same disadvantages as Denver. He sent surveyors 
up into the deep canyons and the i)npasscs of the 
Rockies. When they brought back the reports of their 
rccomwissances, practical railroad men laughed at Mr. 
Moffat. 

The big bankers of the East also laughed at him when 
he came to them with the scheme, but the man was of 
the sort who is never daunted by ridicule. He had a 
sublime faith in his project, and when men told him that 
the summit of 10,000 feet above the sea level where he 
proposed to cross the divide was an impossibility, he 
would retort about the number of long miles he was 
going to save between the capital of Colorado and the 
capital of Utah and he would tell of the single Routt 
county stretch, a territory approximating the size of the 
state of Massachusetts and estimated to hold enough coal 



DENVER 273 

to feed the furnace fires of the United States for three 
hundred years. When he was refused money in New 
York and Chicago he would return to Denver and some- 
how manage to raise some there. The Moffat road 
was begun, despite the scoffers. Its promoter made re- 
peated trips across the continent to secure money, and 
each time when he was home again he would raise the 
dollars in his own beloved Denver and move the ter- 
minal of his road west a few miles. He was at it until 
the day of his death and he lived long enough to see 
his railroad within short striking reach of the treasures 
of Routt county. 

At his death it passed into the hands of a receiver, and 
Denver seemed to have awakened from its dream of 
being upon the trunk-line of a transcontinental railroad. 
But there were hands to take up the lines where Moffat 
had dropped them. Times might have been hard and 
loan money scarce around Colorado, but the men who 
were taking up what seemed to be the deathless project 
of Denver's own railroad were hardly daunted. In- 
stead, they boldly revised Moffat's profile and prepared 
to cut two thousand feet off the backbone of the con- 
tinent and shorten their line many miles by digging a 
tunnel six miles long and costing some four millions of 
dollars. Now a tunnel six miles long and costing $4,000,- 
000 is quite an enterprise, even to a road which has 
boasted thirty-two of them in a single day's trip up to 
the divide ; a particularly difficult enterprise to a road 
still in the shadows of bankruptcy. But the men who 
were directing the fortunes of the Denver & Salt Lake 
— as the Moffat road is now known — had a plan. 
Would not the city of Denver lend its credit to an enter- 
prise so fraught with commercial possibilities for it? 
Would not the city of Denver arrange a bond issue for 
the digging of that tunnel — incidentally finding therein 
a good investment for its spare dollars? 



274 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

Would Denver do that? Ask this man over there. 
He is well acquainted with the Paris of America. 

" Of course it would," he answers. ''If some one 
was to come along with a scheme to expend five million 
dollars in building a statue to Jupiter atop of Pikes 
Peak, he would find plenty of supporters and enthusi- 
asm in Denver. The only scheme that does not succeed 
out there is the one that is practical." 

The gentleman is sarcastic — and yet not very far 
from the truth. For last year when the bond issue for 
the railroad tunnel went to a vote it was carried — with 
enthusiasm. Thereafter Denver was upon the trunk- 
line railroad map. The mere facts that the nine miles 
of tunnel were yet to be bored and many additional miles 
of the most difficult railroad construction of the land 
builded to its portals were mere details. The thin air 
of the Mile-High city lifts its citizens well over details. 
And they are far too broad, far too generous to trouble 
with such minute things. 

For in them dwells the real spirit of the West — by 
this time no mere gateway — and it is a rare spirit, in- 
deed. The town, as we have already intimated, has a 
strong social tendency. She has sent her men and 
women, her sons and her daughters to the East and they 
have won for themselves on their own merits. The Atlan- 
tic seaboard has paid full tribute to the measure of her 
training — and why not ? Her schools are as good as 
the best, her fine homes and her little homes together 
would be a credit to any town in the land, her big clubs 
would grace Fifth avenue. Her whole social organism 
from bottom to top is well fibered. It is charmingly 
exclusive in one way, warmly democratic in many others. 

A girl tourist from Cleveland, a recent summer, es- 
sayed to make the ascent of the capitol dome between 
two connecting trains. She miscalculated distances dur- 
ing the hour and a half that was at her disposal and 



DENVER 275 

almost missed her outbound train. She surely would 
have missed it, if it had not been for the courtesy of a 
well-dressed Denver woman. The girl stood at the cor- 
ner of Seventeenth street and Broadway, where a group 
of large hotels center, waiting for a trolley car to take 
her to the station. She could see its sightly tower a 
long way down Seventeenth street, but there were no 
cars in sight at that instant. She spoke to the woman, 
who was coming out of a drug store, and asked about 
the car service to the station. In the East she might 
have had a perfunctory answer, if she received an an- 
swer at all. The Denver woman began explaining, then 
she checked herself : 

" Better yet," she smiled, " I have my automobile here 
and ni take you down there while we are talking about 
it." 

The car was a big imported fellow and the girl made 
her train. Some time after, she discovered that the 
woman who had been of such courteous attention was 
one of the very biggest of Denver society leaders. Im- 
agine, if you can, such a thing coming to pass upon the 
Atlantic seaboard — in New York, in Boston, in Phila- 
delphia — or in Charleston ! 

There is still another phase of life in Denver — and 
that is the fact that most of her residents, for one reason 
or another, have drifted out to her from the East. 
Once in a long while, if you loaf over your morning 
newspaper on a shady bench in the Capitol grounds, 
you will become acquainted with some whiskered old fel- 
low who will tell you that he chased antelope where the 
big and showy City Park today stands, that he remem- 
bers clearly when a nearby street was the Santa Fe 
Trail and then a country road, and that two genera- 
tions after him are living in Denver ; or sometimes if 
you go down into Larimer street, which is old Denver, 



276 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

you can find a veteran who likes to prate of other days 
— of the time when he used to pack down to the capital 
from his mountain claim, one hundred and twenty-five 
miles over the mountain snows, for his winter's bacon. 
But the majority of these Denverites have come from 
the East. There is some old town in New England with 
avenues of giant trees that is still home to them, and yet 
they all have a heap of affection for the city of their 
adoption. 

Some of them have gone to Denver against their will, 
and that is the tragic shadow of Colorado. They are 
expatriates — exiles, if you please — for Colorado is the 
American Siberia. This dread thing, this thing that is 
impartial to all low altitudes — the white plague — 
marks the victims, who go shuffling their way to die 
among the hills — in the gay Paris of North America. 
It is the gaunt tragedy of Denver, and even though the 
Denverites speak lightheartedly of the " T. B.'s " who 
have come to dwell among them, they themselves know 
best the bitter tragedy of it all. 

Here were two girls, sisters, who worked in a restau- 
rant. A customer held his home newspaper spread as he 
supped alone. Its title, after the fashion of country 
weeklies, was emblazoned that all might read ; the wide- 
spread eagle has been its feature for three-quarters of a 
century now. One of the waitresses made bold to 
speak. 

"So you are from near Syracuse?" she said. 

It was affirmed. She beckoned to her sister to come 
over. The little restaurant — Denver fashion, it made 
specialities of " short orders," cream waffles and T-bone 
steaks — was almost deserted. She spoke to her 
sister. 

" He's from Syracuse," she said. The sister was a 
delicate, colorless little thing, but the blood flushed up 
into her pale cheeks for an instant. 



DENVER 277 

" We're from Syracuse," she said proudly. " We used 
to live up on the hill, just around the corner from the 
college. It was great fun to see the students go climb- 
ing up around Mount Olympus there. It was twice as 
great fun in winter, when the north wind was blowing 
the snow right up into our faces." 

Exiles these. They had left their nice, comfortable 
home there in the snug, New York state city to make 
the long dreary trek to Denver. They were clever girls, 
and it seemed certain that they might find work in 
some nice office in the big and growing Colorado city. 
They were fairly competent stenographers, and it seemed 
to them that they might live in peace and comfort in 
the new home. It was a change from their big Syra- 
cuse house to a narrow ballroom in a Denver boarding 
house. Then upon that came the fruitless search for a 
" nice place." Hundreds of other girl stenographers, 
driven on the long trip West, were pressing against them. 
The two Syracusans held their heads high — for a time. 
Then they were glad to get the menial places as wait- 
resses. 

The man who checks trunks at one of the biggest 
transfer companies confessed that he was an exile, too. 

" Came out here a dozen years ago with a busted 
lung," he admitted with a quizzical smile. " Guess I'll 
stay for a while longer. But I want to go back to Bal- 
timore. Before I am done with it I am going back to 
Baltimore. I'm going to walk down Charles street once 
again and breathe the fragrance of the flowers in the gar- 
dens, if it kills me." 

A girl in a boarding house leaned up against the wall 
of the broad and shady piazza and said she liked Denver 
" really, truly, immensely." 

"Do you honestly?" 

" Honestly," she drawled gravely. " God knows, I've 
got to. I'm a lunger, although they don't know it here. 



278 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

I've only got one lung, but it's a good lung," she ended 
with a little hysterical laugh. 

Another exile. The American Siberia, in truth, save 
that this Siberia is a near Paradise — a kingdom for 
exiles where the grass is as green as it is back in the old 
East, where the trees cast welcome shade and the strange 
new flowers blossom out smiles of hope. But a Siberia 
none the less. The big sanitariums all about the city 
tell that. The keeper of the Denver Morgue will tell 
it, too. The suicide rate in Denver runs high. Des- 
perate folk go out to Colorado to shut the door in the 
face of death — and go too late. They are far from 
home, alone, friendless, penniless in despair — the figures 
of the statisticians cannot lie. 

The East has this as a debt to pay Denver, and 
generally she pays it royally. Denver does not forget 
the times when the Atlantic seaboard has come to her 
assistance — despite the troubles of David H. Moffat 
in raising capital for his railroad. Once in a business 
council there while the East was getting some rather 
hard knocks for its " fool conservatism " — perhaps it 
had been refusing to buy the bonds of the mountain- 
climbing railroad — a big Denver banker got the 
floor. He was a man who could demand attention — 
and receive it. 

" I want you to remember one thing," he said ; " fif- 
teen years ago we were laying out and selling town-lots 
for a dozen miles east of Denver ; we were selling them to 
Easterners — for their good money. When they came 
out and looked for their land what did they see? They 
saw plains — mile after mile of plains — peopled by 
what? They were peopled by jackrabbits, and the jack- 
rabbits were bald from bumping their heads against the 
surveyors' stakes. Until we have redeemed those lots 
and built our city out to them and upon them, gentlemen, 
we have not redeemed our promise to the East." 



DENVER 279 

And no one who knows Denver doubts that the time 
will yet come when she will redeem that promise. Her 
railroad may or may not come to be a transcontinental 
route of importance, manufacturing may or may not de- 
scend upon her with its grime and industry and wealth, 
but her magnificent situation there at the base of the 
Rockies will continue to make her at least a social factor 
in the gradually lengthening roll of really vital Ameri- 
can cities. 



i8 

TWO RIVALS OF THE NORTH PACIFIC — AND 
A THIRD 

44TT /HEN you get to Portland you will see New 

\\ England transplanted. You will see the most 

American town on the continent, bar only Philadelphia." 

The man on the train shrieking westward down 
through the marvelous valley of the Columbia spoke like 
an oracle. He had a little group of oddly contorted 
valises that bespoke him as a traveling salesman, and 
hence a person of some discrimination and judgment. 
He was ready to talk politics, war to the death on rail- 
roads, musical comedy and the condition of the mar- 
kets with an equally uncertain knowledge, a fund of 
priceless information that never permitted itself to under- 
go even the slightest correction. 

But he was right, absolutely right, about Portland. 
From the cleanest railroad station that we have ever 
seen, even though the building is more than twenty years 
old, to the very crests of the fir-lined hills that wall her 
in, here is a town that is so absolutely American, that it 
seems as if she might even boast one of the innumera- 
ble George Washington headquarters somewhere on her 
older streets. Her downtown streets are conservatively 
narrow, her staunch Post Office suggests a public build- 
ing in one of the older cities on the Atlantic coast, and 
her shops are a medley of delights, with apparently about 
thirty percent of them given over to the retail vending of 
chocolate. Our Portland guide was grieved when we 
made mention of this last fact. 

280 



PORTLAND — SEATTLE — TACOMA 281 

" I once went to Boston," said he, " and found it an 
almost continuous piano store." 

Which was, of course, a mere evasion of the truth of 
our suggestion as to the chocolate propensities of the 
maids of Portland. They are very much like the girls 
in Hartford or Indianapolis or St. Paul or any other 
bustling town across this land, attending the Saturday 
matinees with an almost festal regularity; rollicking, 
flirting girls, grave and gay, girls dancing and girls 
driving their big six-cylinder automobiles with almost 
unerring accuracy up the tremendous hills of the town. 

Hills they really are and well worth the tall climb to 
Council Crest, the showiest of them all. H your host 
does not mind tire expense and the wear and tear on his 
engine, he may take you up there in his automobile. 
The street car makes the same ascent, and the managers 
of the local traction system who have to pay for all the 
repairs and renewals to the cars do not hesitate to say 
that it is the least profitable line in creation. But the 
final result at Council Crest is worth a set of tires, or a 
six-months' ageing of a trolley car. 

You have climbed up from the heart of the busy town, 
past the business section, spreading itself out as business 
sections of all successful towns must continue to do, 
past the trim snug little white Colonial houses — that 
must have been stolen from old Salem or Newburyport 

all set among the dark greens of the cedars and the 

firs, and belying the Northland tales of the tree foliage 
by the great rose-bushes that bloom all the year round, 
up on to the place where tradition says the silent chiefs 
of red men used to gather. . . . Below you from Coun- 
cil Crest the town — the town, at dusk, if you please. 
The arcs are showing the regular pattern of trim streets, 
the shops and the big office buildings are aglow for the 
night with the brilliancy of artificial illumination. It is 
dark down in the town — night has closed in upon it. 



282 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

Now lift your eyes and let them carry past the town 
and the black gloom of the river, over the nearest en- 
circlings of the fir-clad hills and see the day die in the 
most high place. You see it now — a peculiar pink 
cloud, which is not a cloud at all, but a snow-capped 
cone-shaped peak rising into the darkening heavens. 
Mount Hood is an asset for Portland, because for any 
habitation of man it would be an inspiration. And be- 
yond Mount Hood — fifty miles distant — but further 
to the north are Mount Adams, Mount St. Helen's and 
sometimes on a fine clear evening Rainier bidding alike 
brilliant farewells to the dying day. 

This then is the city into which a traveler may enter 
on an autumn day to find the innumerable cedars and 
firs, the changing brilliancy of the maple leaves proclaim- 
ing it North, with the gaily blossoming rose-bushes and 
the home-grown strawberries of October telling a para- 
doxical story and locating the Oregon metropolis to the 
South. The publicity experts of the town can — and 
do — sound its praises in no faint terms. They will 
tell you of a single day when twenty-two wheat vessels 
were at Portland docks gathering the food-stufifs for 
a hungry Orient, they will reel off statistics as to the 
shipping powers of the great lumber port in all the 
world and then, without a lessening of the pride, will 
go further and explain Portland's hopes for the further 
inland navigation of the streams that make her an im- 
portant ocean port although fifty miles distant from the 
sight of the sea. The Columbia river is already naviga- 
ble for four hundred miles inland and Portland is today 
cooperating with the Canadian authorities in British 
Columbia for extending the waterway's availability as a 
carrier for another four hundred miles. A great work 
has been performed in pulling the teeth of the mighty 
Columbia where it meets the sea — in building jetties at 
the mouth of the river. The government with unusual 




CQ 



PORTLAND — SEATTLE — TACOMA 283 

energy is making new locks at the impressive Cascades. 
Portland has good reason for her faith in the future. 
Her railroad systems are in their infancy ; a part of Cen- 
tral Oregon as large as the state of Ohio is just now being 
reached by through routes from Portland. What future 
they shall bring her no man dares to predict. 

But we, for ourselves, shall like to continue to think 
of Portland as a gentle American town set between 
guardian fir-clad hills and sentineled by snow-capped 
peaks; we shall enjoy remembering the yellow and red 
leaves of Autumn, the luxuriant roses, the strawberries 
and the crisp October nights in one delightful paradoxical 
jumble. 

To make a great seaport city out of a high-springing 
ridge of volcanic origin was a truly herculean task, but 
Seattle sprang to it with all the enthusiasm of her youth. 
" Re-grading " is what she has called it, and because 
even armies of men with pick and with shovel could not 
work fast enough for her own satisfaction, she borrowed 
a trick from the old-time gold miners and put hose-men 
at work. Hydraulic science supplanted men and teams 
and picks and even the big steam shovels. The splash- 
ing hose wore down the crest of the great hills until 
sturdy buildings teetered on their foundations and late 
moving tenants had to come and go up and down long 
ladders. 

In 1 88 1 President Hayes came to this strange little 
lumbering town and spoke from the platform of the two- 
storied Occidental Hotel in the center of the village to 
its entire population — some five hundred persons. The 
Occidental Hotel was gone within ten years, to be re- 
placed by a hostelry that in 1890 was big and showy for 
any town and that in 1912, Seattle regarded almost as a 
relic of past ages. And stranger still, the hills — the 
eternal hills, if you please— -that looked upon the Occi- 



284 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

dental Hotel only yesterday, have gone. Not that Seattle 
will not always be a side-hill town, that the cable cars 
will not continue to climb up Madison street from the 
waterfront like flies upon a window-glass, but that a 
tremendous reformation has been wrought, with the aid 
of engineers' skill and the famous " hard money " of the 
Pacific coast. 

For here was a town that decided almost overnight to 
be a seaport of world-wide reputation. She looked at 
her high hills ruefully. Then she called for the hose- 
men. The hills were doomed. 

There was Denny hill, with a park of five acres capping 
it. The surveyors set their rival stakes five hundred feet 
below the lowest level of the little park and a matter of 
almost a million cubic yards of earth went sploshing 
down the long hydraulic sluices to make the tide-water 
flats at the bottom of the hills into solid footing for fu- 
ture factories and warehouses. And when the " re- 
graders " were done the architects and the builders were 
upon their heels. 

Denny hill had boasted a hotel upon its summit, which 
in the late eighties Seattle regarded as an architectural 
triumph, a wooden thing of angles and shingles and queer 
Queen Anne turrets and dormers. The name of the old 
hotel went to a new one which supplanted it at a proper 
altitude for a city that was determined to be metropoli- 
tan — and the new hotel was a dignified structure worthy 
of the best town in all this land. 

" We had to do it," the Seattle man will tell you, with- 
out smiling. " We have got to be ready for a popula- 
tion of a million or more. Our house has got to be in 
order." 

It is not every day that one can see an American met- 
ropolitan city in the making. 

Back of the high-crested hills that have been suffered 



PORTLAND — SEATTLE — TACOMA 285 

to remain as a part of the topography of this remark- 
able town — for its residents still like to perch their smart 
new houses where they may command a view of Ptiget 
Sound or the snow-capped Rainier — is as lovely a chain 
of lakes as was ever given to an American city. Boston 
would have made the edges of these the finest suburbs 
in the land ; she is trying some sort of an experiment of 
that kind with her dirty old Charles river. Seattle saw in 
the great bowl of Lake Washington something more. 

" We can crowd into Portland a, little more," said the 
shrewdest of her citizens, " by making this lake into a 
fresh-water harbor." 

Just what the advantages of a fresh-water harbor may 
be to Seattle which already possesses one of the finest 
deep-water harbors on the North Pacific, may be ob- 
scure to you for the moment. Then the Seattle man in- 
forms you that Portland has a fresh-water harbor, that 
the masters of ships, still thirty days' sailing from port, 
make for its haven, knowing that in fresh water the bar- 
nacles that make so great a drag upon a vessel's progress 
will fall away from the hull. A fresh-water bath for a 
salt-water hull is better than a drain-ofif in a dry dock 
— and a great sight cheaper. 

Here, then, is a masterful new town seeking new points 
of advantage over its rivals, piercing canals through to 
its backyard lakes so that it may eventually be as com- 
pletely surrounded by docks and shipping as are New 
York and Boston. It is impossible to think of Seattle 
ever hesitating. Seattle proceeds to accomplish. Be- 
fore she has a real opportunity to count the cost, the im- 
provements which she has undertaken are rolling in rev- 
enue to her coffers. 

Tacoma is smaller than either Seattle or Portland — 
and not one whit less vigorous than either of them. She 
has not undergone the wholesale transformations of her 



286 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

sister to the north and still retains all the aspects of a 
busy port of the Far North — long reaching wharves, 
busy, dirty railroad yards reaching and serving them, fir- 
clad hills rising from the water, the smell and industry 
of lumber — and back of all these her mountain. It is 
her mountain — " The Mountain that was God " as the 
Indians used to say — and if for long weeks it may stay 
modestly hidden behind fog-banks, there do come days 
when its great snow-capped peak gazes serenely down 
upon the little city. 

Do not dare to come into this town and call her moun- 
tain Rainier, after the fashion of government " map 
sharps " and railroad advertisements. It is Mount Ta- 
coma, if you please, and woe be to any man who calls it 
anything else. Former President Taft once shouldered 
the question upon reaching the northwestern corner of the 
land like a true diplomat. At the dinners in both Seattle 
and Tacoma he referred to the great guardian peak of 
Washington as " the mountain " thereby offending no one 
and leaving a pleasant " lady or the tiger " mystery as 
to which of the two names he would use in private con- 
versation. 

But whether the mountain be Rainier or Tacoma, it 
is going to be one of the great playgrounds of the nation 
— and that within very few years. Think of starting 
out from a brisk American city of a hundred thousand 
population and within two hours standing at the foot of 
a giant glacier grinding down from the heavens, a cold, 
dead, icy thing but still imbued with the stubborn sort of 
life that stunted vegetable growths possess, a life that 
makes the frozen river travel toward the sea every day 
of the year. A man living in Tacoma, or Seattle, or Port- 
land, for that matter, can have both the dangers and the 
joys of Swiss mountain climbing but a few hours dis- 
tant. It takes knowledge and courage to make the as- 
cent of Rainier — a tedious trip which starts through the 



PORTLAND — SEATTLE — TACOMA 287 

three summer months in which it is possible at five 
o'clock in the morning so as to reach the summit before 
the snows begin to melt to the danger point. And yet, 
in the hands of skilled guides, so many women cross the 
crevices and climb the steep upward trails, that the record 
of their ascents is no longer kept. 

This great Swiss mountain — higher than Blanc, and 
vastly more impressive from the fact that its fourteen 
thousand foot summit rises almost directly from the sea 
— is the central feature of the newest of all the govern- 
ment parks. It is in the stages of early development and 
already the tourists are coming to it in increasing num- 
bers. Given a few years and Rainier will vie in popu- 
larity with the Yellowstone, the Yosemite and the Grand 
Canyon of the Colorado. In scenic beauty of its own 
inimitable sort it already ranks with these. 

The man who makes the ascent of Rainier — if poetry 
and imagination rest within his soul — may truly feel 
that he has come near to God. He can feel the ardor 
and the inspiration of the red men who gave the moun- 
tain its mystic symbolism. He can look up into the 
clouds and feel that he is at the dome of the world. He 
can look down, down past the timber line off across miles 
of timber land and catch the silver of Puget Sound and 
the distant horizon flash of the Pacific. He can see 
smoke to the south — Portland — smoke to the north and 
west — Seattle — and nearer than these — the brisk Ta- 
coma that hugs this mountain to herself. 

If imagination rest within him he can now know that 
these cities, at the northwest corner of America, are 
barely adult, just beginning to come into their own. A 
great measure of growth and strength is yet to be given 
to them. 



19 
SAN FRANCISCO — THE NEWEST PHCENIX 

WE came upon it in the still of an early Sunday 
evening — the wonderful city of Saint Francis. 
Throughout that cloudless Sabbath we had journeyed 
southward through California. At dawn the porter of 
the sleeping car had informed us that we were in the 
Golden State, not to be distinguished in its northern 
reaches from Oregon. Men were talking of the won- 
ders of the Klamath country into which the civilizing 
rails of steel are being steadily pushed, the breath of to- 
morrow was upon the lips of every one who boarded the 
train, but the land itself was wild, half-timbered, rugged 
to the last degree. Through the morning grays the vol- 
canic cone of Shasta was showing ever and ever so 
faintly, and if an acquaintance of two hours with the 
peak that Joaquin Miller has made so famous did not 
enthuse the man behind the car-window, it must have 
been that he was still a bit dazed, not surfeited, with the 
wonders of Rainier. 

At the foot of Shasta our train stood for a bare ten 
minutes while travelers descended and partook of the 
vilest tasting waters that nature might boast in all Cali- 
fornia. Shasta spring water is supposed to be mightily 
beneficial and that is probably true, for our experience 
with spring waters has been that their benefits have ex- 
isted in an inverse ratio to their pleasantness of taste. 
But if Nature had given her benefactions to Shasta a 
sort of Spartan touch, she has more than compensated 
for the severity of her gifts by the beauty of their set- 

288 



SAN FRANCISCO 289 

ting. You literally descend directly upon the springs. 
The railroad performs earthly miracles to land a pas- 
senger in front of them. It descends a vast number of 
feet in an incredibly short length of track — the con- 
ductor will reduce these to cold statistics — and your 
idea is a quick drop on a gigantic hair-pin. At the 
base of the lowest leg of this hair-pin is the spring, set 
in a deep glen, the mossy banks of which are constantly 
adrip and seemingly one great slow-moving waterfall, 
even throughout the fearfully dry seasons of California. 
The whole thing is distinctly European, distinctly dif- 
ferent — a bit of Swiss scenery root-dug and brought 
to the West Coast of the United States. 

After Shasta and the springs, another of the desolate, 
fascinating canyons to be threaded for many miles be- 
sides the twistings of a melancholy river, then — .of a 
sudden — open country, farmers growing green things, 
ranch-houses, dusty county-roads, with automobiles 
plowing them dustier still, little towns, more ranches 
— everything in California from two to two million 
acres is a ranch — then a grinding of air-brakes and 
your neighbor across the aisle is fumbling with his red- 
covered time-table to locate the station upon it. As for 
you, you don't care about what station it really may be. 
It is a station. You are sure of that. There is the fa- 
miliar light yellow depot, but in the well-kept lawn that 
abuts it grows a giant tree. That tree is a palm, and 
the palm-tree typifies California to every tingling sense 
of your mentality. 

This is the real California. The mountains have al- 
ready become accustomed things to you, the broad 
ranches were coming into their own before you ever 
reached Denver, but the palm is exotic in your homeland, 
a glass-protected thing. That it grows freely beside this 
little unidentified railroad station proclaims to you that 
you are at last in a land that bids defiance to that trinity 



290 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

of scourging giants — December, January and February 
— and calls itself summer the whole year round. 

This palm has brought you to a sense of your loca- 
tion — to California. The romance that has been spelled 
into you of a distant land, and of the men who toiled 
that it become a great state peopled with great cities, 
of Nature's lavish gifts and terrific blows laid alike upon 
it, came into your heart and soul and body at the first 
glimpse of that tree. Before the train is under way again 
your camera has been called into action — mental proc- 
esses are supplemented by a permanent record chemi- 
cally etched upon a film of celluloid. 

After that pioneer among palm-trees, more of these 
little yellow depots and more of these rarely beautiful 
palms standing beside them. The ranches multiply, this 
valley of Sacramento is a rarely fertile thing. Growth 
stretches for miles, without ever a hint of undulation. 
California is the flattest thing you have ever seen. And 
again and again you will be declaring it the most moun- 
tainous of all our states. The flat-lands carry you beyond 
daylight into dusk. The towns multiply, a glow of arc 
reflection against the shadows of evening is Sacramento 
a dozen miles distant. Then there is a rattle of switches, 
a halt at a junction station, and mail is being gathered 
from the impromptu literature makers on our train to 
go east. The main line is reached. And a little later 
the Straits of Costa are crossed. Here is a broad arm of 
the sea and if it were still lingering daylight you might 
declare that Holland, not Switzerland, had been trans- 
planted into California. The sea laughs at bridges, and 
so from Benecia to Port Costa we go on a great ferry- 
boat, eleven Pullmans, a great ten-drivered passenger 
locomotive — all of us together. For twenty minutes we 
slip across the water, breathing fresh air once again and 
standing in the ferry's bow looking toward the shadowy 
outline of a high, black hill carelessly punctuated here 



SAN FRANCISCO 291 

and there by yellow points of light. A new land is 
always mysterious and fascinating; by night doubly mys- 
terious, doubly fascinating. 

The ferry boat fast to its bridge, the locomotive is no 
longer an impotent thing. We are making the last stage 
of a long trip across the continent by rail. The 
little towns are multiplying. The subtle prescience 
of a great city is upon us. We turn west, then south 
and the suburban villages are shouldering one another 
all the more closely the entire way. We skirt and barely 
miss Berkeley, hesitate at Oakland and then come to a 
grinding final stop at the end of a pier that juts itself 
far out beyond the shallow reaches of San Francisco bay. 
Again there is a ferry boat — a capacious craft not un- 
like those craft upon which we have ridden time and time 
again between Staten island and the tip of Manhattan 
— and when its screws have ceased to turn we will finally 
be in the real San Francisco, reached as a really great 
metropolis may be reached, after an infinitude of time 
and trouble. It is still October — the warmest month 
of the year in the city by the Golden Gate — and the girls 
and their young men fill the long benches on the open 
decks of the ferry. The wind blows soft from the Pa- 
cific, and straight ahead is San Francisco — a mystery 
of yellow illumination rising from the water's edge. 

As the ferry makes her course, the goal is less and less 
of a mystery. Street lights begin to give some sort of 
half-coherent form to the high hills that make the amphi- 
theater site of San Francisco, they dip in even lines to 
show the course of straight avenues. A great beer sign 
changes and rechanges in spelling its lively message, 
there is a moon-faced clock held aloft, you pinch your 
memory sharply, and then know that it must be the 
tower of the great ferry-house, the conspicuous water- 
front land-mark of San Francisco. 

In another five minutes you are passing under that 



292 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

tower — a veritable gate-keeper of the city — and facing 
up Market street; from the beginning its undisputed 
chief thoroughfare. A taxicab is standing there. You 
throw your hand-baggage into it, come tumbhng after, 
yourself. There is a confusion of street-lights, a mo- 
mentary intimacy of a trolley car running alongside — ' 
a little later the glare and confusion of a hotel lobby, 
the fascinating fuss of getting yourself settled in a 
strange town. There is a double witchery in approach- 
ing a great new city at night. 

In the morning to tumble out of your hotel into that 
same strange town in the clarity of early sunshine, to 
have this great street or that or that — Market or Geary 
or Powell — stretching forth as if longing to invite your 
explorations — here again is the fascination of travel. 
The big trolley cars come rolling up Market street in 
quick succession, and for an instant their appeal is 
strong. But over there is a car of another sort, running 
on narrow-gauge tracks and with the roar of an endless 
cable ever at work beneath the pavement. The little 
cars upon those narrow tracks interest you. They are as 
gaily colored and as bravely striped as any circus wagon 
of boyhood days, and when you pay your fare you can 
take your choice — between the interior of a stuffy little 
cabin amidships or open seats at either end arranged 
after the time-honored fashion of Irish jaunting cars. 
San Franciscans do not hesitate. They range themselves 
along the open seats of the dinky cars and look proud 
as toads as the cars go clanking up the awful hills. 

The San Francisco cable car is in a transportation 
class by itself. It clings tenaciously to early traditions. 
For in San Francisco the cable railroad was born — and 
in San Francisco the cable railroad still remains. One 
Andrew S. Halladie was its inventor — somewhere early 
in the " seventies." Up Clay street hill, and to know 
and appreciate the slope of Clay street hill one must 



SAN FRANCISCO 293 

have seen it once at least, Halladie's first car struggled, 
while its passengers held their breaths just as first-comers 
to San Francisco still hold their breaths as they ride up 
and down the fearful hills. The telegraph told to the 
whole land how a street railroad was running on a rope 
out in that little-known land of marvels — California. 
But the telegraph could not tell what the railroad on a 
rope meant to San Francisco — San Francisco encom- 
passed and held in by her high sand hills. The Clay 
street cable road had conquered one of the meanest of 
these hills and they began to plan other roads of a similar 
sort. Like a blossoming and growing vine the city 
spread, almost overnight. Sand-dunes became building- 
lots of high value and a new bonanza era was come to 
San Francisco. And, with the traditional generosity of 
the coast, she gave her transportation idea to other 
cities. In a little while St. Louis, Chicago, Washington 
and New York were banishing the horse cars from their 
busiest streets. A new era in city transit was begun. 

A few years later the broomstick trolley — cheaper 
and in many respects far more efficient — displaced the 
cable-cars in many of these cities. But San Francisco 
up to the present time has stuck loyally to her old-time 
hill conquerors. And the nervous lever-clutch of the 
gripman as he " gets the rope " is as distinctive of her as 
are the fantasies of her marvelous wooden architecture. 

Some of the cable cars have disappeared — they began 
to go in those wonderful years of reconstruction right 
after the fire, and they are already obsolete in the city's 
chief thoroughfare, Market street. The others remain. 
Over on Pacific avenue is a little line that the San Fran- 
ciscans dearly love, for it is particularly reminiscent of 
the trams that used to clatter through Market street be- 
fore the fire — a diminutive summer-house in front and 
pulling an immaculate little horseless horse car behind. 
Eventually all will go. One road's franchise has already 



294 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

expired and upon it San Francisco is today maintaining 
the first municipally operated street car line in any met- 
ropolitan city of America. If the experiment in Geary 
street succeeds, and it is being carefully operated with 
such a hope clearly in view, it will probably be extended 
to the cable lines when their franchises expire and they 
revert automatically to the city. 

The distinctive mannerisms of San Francisco are 
changing — slowly but very surely indeed. Some of 
them still remain, however, in greater or less force. At 
the restaurants, in the shops and in the hotels you re- 
ceive your change in " hard money " — gold and silver 
coin. Your real San Franciscan will have nothing else. 
There is something about the substantial feeling of a 
coin, something about the tinkling of a handful of it 
that runs straight to the bottom of his heart. Since the 
fire ■ — which worked ever more fearful havoc with San 
Francisco comforts than with the physical structure of 
the city — the use of paper money has increased. But 
your true Californian will have none of it. When he 
goes east and they give him paper money he fusses and 
fumes about it — inwardly at least. He thinks that it 
may slip out of that pesky inner pocket or vest or coat. 
He wants gold — a handful of it in his trousers-pocket 
to jingle and to stay put. And as for pennies. You 
who count yourself of the East will have to come east 
once again before you pocket such copper trash — they 
will have none of them upon the West Coast. Small 
change may be anything else but it is not Western. 

"Western," did we say? 

Hold on. San Francisco is not western. California 
is not western. To call either western is to commit an 
abomination approaching the use of the word " Frisco." 

" California is to all purposes, practical and social — - 
a great island," your San Franciscan will explain to you. 



SAN FRANCISCO 295 

" To the east of us lies another dividing sea — the broad 
miles of desert and of mountains, and so broad is it that 
Hong Kong or Manila or Yokohama seem nearer to us 
than Chicago or St. Louis. We recognize nothing west 
of New York and Washington. Between is that vast 
space — the real West — which fast trains and good, 
bridge in a little more than four days. In there is your 
West — Illinois, Mississippi, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado 
— all the rest of that fine family of American states. 

" In Los Angeles, now, it is different. The lady that 
you take out upon your arm there is probably from 
Davenport or Kokomo or Indianapolis, whether she will 
admit it or not. Los Angeles is western. We are not. 
We are ' the Coast ' and be exceeding careful, young 
man, how you say it." 

He has spoken the truth. Your typical San Francis- 
can is quite as well versed in the streets and shops and 
hotels of London, Paris and Vienna, as your typical New 
Yorker or Bostonian. The four days bridging across the 
North American continent is no more to him than the 
Hudson river ferries to the commuter from New Jersey, 
His city is cosmopolitan — and he is proud of it. Her 
streets are cosmopolitan and so are her shops and her 
great hotels. To the stately Palace reared from the site 
of the old, and with a new glass-covered court rivaling 
the glories of its predecessor, still come princes and dip- 
lomats, globe-trotters of every sort and bearing in their 
train wondrous luggage of every sort, prosperous miners 
from the North, bankers from the East, Californians 
from every corner of their great state, and look with 
curious interest at the elect of San Francisco sipping 
their high tea there in the court yard. 

And the cosmopolitanism of the streets is still more 
marked. Portuguese, Italian, sour-doughs from Alaska, 
hundreds of the little brown Japs who are giving Cali- 
fornia such a tremendous worry these days, Indians, 



296 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

French Kanakas, Mexicans, Chinese — the list might 
be run almost interminably. Of these none are more in- 
teresting than the Chinese. You see them in all the 
downtown quarters of San Francisco — the men with that 
inscrutable gravity and sagacity that long centuries of 
civilization seem to have given them, the women and 
the little girls, of high caste or low, invariably hatless 
and wearing loose coat and trousers — in many cases of 
brilliant colors and rare Oriental silks. And when you 
come to their own city within a city — San Francisco's 
famous Chinatown — they are the dominant folk upon 
the street. Of course the new Chinatown is not the 
old — with its subterranean labyrinths of unspeakable 
vileness and dirt, with danger and crime lurking in each 
of its dark corners. That passed completely in the fire. 
But it had begun to pass even before that great calamity. 
It was being exploited. Paid guides, with a keen sense 
of the theatrical, were beginning to work the damage. 
The " rubberneck wagons " were multiplying. 

Today Chinatown is frankly commercial. It is clean 
and new and clever. Architects have brought more of 
the Chinese spirit into its buildings than the old ever had. 
It does not lack color — by day, the treasures of its shops, 
the queer folk who walk its streets, even the bright red 
placards upon the door-lintels; by night the close slow- 
moving throngs through Grant avenue — its chief 
thoroughfare — the swinging lanterns above their heads, 
the radiance that comes out from brilliantly lighted and 
mysterious rooms along the way — the new Chinatown 
of San Francisco. But it is now frankly commercial. 
The paid guides and the " rubberneck wagons " have 
completed the ruin. If you are taken into an opium den, 
you may be fairly sure that the entire performance has 
been staged for the delectation of you and yours. For 
the real secrets even of the new Chinatown are not 
shown to the unappreciative eyes of white folk. 



SAN FRANCISCO 297 

At the edge of Chinatown slopes Portsmouth square 
and here the cosmopoHtanism of San Francisco reaches 
its high apex. Around it chatters the babel of all tongues, 
beyond it stretches the " Barbary Coast," * that col- 
lection of vile, if picturesque resorts that possesses a 
tremendous fascination for some San Franciscans and 
some tourists but which has no place within the covers 
of this book. To Portsmouth square come the repre- 
sentatives of all these little colonies of babbling for- 
eigners, the men who sail the seven seas — the flotsam 
and the jetsam not alone of the Orient but of the whole 
wide world as well. There is a little man who sits on 
one side of the square and who for a very small sum will 
execute cubist art upon your cuticle. Among tattooers he 
acknowledges but two superiors — a one-legged veteran 
who plies his trade near the wharves of the Mersey, and 
a Hindu artist at Calcutta. The little shops that line 
Portsmouth square are the little shops of many peo- 
ples. Over their counters you can buy many things prac- 
tical, and many, many more of the most impractical things 
in all the world. And the new Hall of Justice rises above 
the square in the precise site of the old. 

Portsmouth square has played its part in the history 
of San Francisco. From it the modern city dates. It 
was the plaza of the old Spanish town, and within this 
plaza Commodore Montgomery of the American sloop- 
of-war Portsmouth first raised the Stars and Stripes 
— in the strenuous days of the Mexican war. After 
that the stirring days of gold-times with the vigilantes 
conducting hangings on the flat roofs of the neighboring 
houses of adobe. Portsmouth square indeed has played 
its part in the history of San Francisco. 

" Portsmouth square," you begin to say, " Portsmouth 

* As this goes to press a "vice crusade" has swept San 
Francisco and the " Barbary Coast " has been forced to close its 
doors. It is not unlikely that they may be opened once again. 

E. H. 



298 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

square — was it not Portsmouth square that Steven- 
son—" 

Precisely so. There are still some of the shop-keepers 
about that ancient plaza who can recall the thin figure 
of the poet and dreamer who loafed lazy days in that 
open space — hobnobbing with sailors and the strange 
dark-skinned vagabond folk from overseas. There is a 
single monument in the square today — a smooth mono- 
lith upon whose top there rests a ship, its sails full-bellied 
to the wind but which never reaches a port^Upon the 
smooth surface of that stone you may read : 

TO REMEMBER 

ROBERT LOUIS 

STEVENSON 

To be honest To be 
kind — To earn a lit- 
tle To spend a lit- 
tle less — to make 
upon the whole a 
family happier for 
his presence — To re- 
nounce when that shall 
be necessary and not 
be embittered — To 
keep a few friends but 
these without capitula- 
tion — Above all on 
the same grim condi- 
tion to keep friends 
with himself — Here is 
a task for all that a 
man has of fortitude 
and delicacy 

That is the lesson that Portsmouth square gives to the 
wanderers who drag themselves today to its benches — - 
the words that come as a sermon from one who knew 
and who pitied wrecked humanity. 

There are other great squares of San Francisco — 



SAN FRANCISCO 299 

and filled with interest — perhaps none other more so 
than Union square, in the heart of the fine retail section 
with its theaters and hotels and clubs. Of these last 
there is none more famous than the Bohemian. More 
showy clubs has San Francisco. The Pacific Union in its 
great brown-stone house upon the very crest of Nob Hill, 
where in other days the bonanza millionaires were wont 
to build their high houses so that they might look across 
the housetops and see the highways in from the sea, has 
a home unsurpassed by any other in the whole land. 
But the Bohemian does not get its fame from its fine 
town club-house. Its " jinks " held in August in a great 
cluster of giant redwood trees off in the wonderful Cali- 
fornia hills are world-renowned. In the old days all 
that was necessary for a man to be a Bohemian, beyond 
the prime requisite of being a good fellow, was that he 
be able to sing a song, to tell a story or to write a verse. 
In these days the Bohemian Club, like many other insti- 
tutions that were simple in the beginning, has waxed pros- 
perous. Some of its members have rather elaborate cot- 
tages in among the redwoods and go back and forth in 
automobiles. But much of the old spirit remains. It 
is the spirit which the San Franciscan tells you gave 
first American recognition to such an artist as Luisa Tet- 
razzini, which many years ago gave such a welcome to 
the then famous Lotta that the generous actress in a burst 
of generous enthusiasm returned with the gift to the 
city of the Lotta fountain — at one of the most famous 
of the Market street corners. It is the spirit which 
makes San Francisco give to art or literature the quickest 
appreciation of any city in America. It is, in fact, the 
same spirit that gives to San Francisco the reputation of 
having the gayest night life of any city in the world — 
with the possible exception of Paris. 

Night life in a city means the intoxication of many 
lights, the creature comfort of good restaurants. San 



300 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

Francisco does not lack either. When the last glimmer 
of day has disappeared out over the Golden Gate, Mar- 
ket street, Powell street, all the highways and the byways 
that lead into them are ablaze with the incandescent 
glories of electricity. Commerce and the city's lighting 
boards vie with one another in the splendor of their offer- 
ings. 

And as for the restaurants — San Francisco boasts of 
twelve hundred hotels, alone. Each hotel has presuma- 
bly at least one restaurant. And some of the finest of 
the eating-places of the city at the Golden Gate are 
solely restaurants. As a matter of real fact, San Fran- 
cisco is the greatest restaurant city on the continent — 
in proportion to her population even greater than New 
York. In New York and more recently in Chicago the 
so-called " kitchenette apartment " has come into great 
vogue among tiny folks — two or three rooms, a bath and 
a very slightly enlarged clothes-press in which a small 
gas or electric stove, a sink and a refrigerator suffices for 
the preparation of light breakfasts and lunches. Din- 
ners are taken out. In San Francisco the " kitchenettes " 
are omitted in thousands of apartments. All the meals 
are eaten in public dining-rooms and the restaurants 
thrive wonderfully. The soft climate does much to make 
this possible. 

Living in these new apartments of San Francisco is a 
comparatively simple matter. Your capital investment 
for house-keeping may be small. A few chairs, a table 
or two, some linen — you are ready to begin. 

Beds? 

Bless your soul, the builder of the apartment house 
solved that problem for you. Your bed is a master- 
piece of architecture which lets down from the wall, 
a la Pullman. By day it goes up against the wall again 
and an ingenious arrangement of wall-shutters enables 
the bedding to air throughout the entire day. In some 



SAN FRANCISCO 301 

cases the beds will let down either within, or without, 
to a sleeping-porch, for your real San Franciscan has a 
healthy sort of an animal love for living and sleeping 
in the open. The glories of the open California country 
that lie within an hour or two of the city tempt him into 
it each month of the year, and he is impeccable in his 
horseback riding, his fishing and his shooting. 

To return to the restaurants — a decided contrast to 
that rough life in the open which he really loves — here 
is one, quite typical of the city. It is gay, almost garish 
with color and with light. Its cabaret almost amounts 
to an operatic performance and its proprietor will tell 
you with no little pride that he was presenting this form 
of restaurant entertainment long months before the idea 
ever reached New York. He will also tell you that he 
changes the entire scheme of decoration each three 
months — the San Franciscan mind is as volatile as it 
is appreciative. 

Little Jap girls pass through the crowded tables bring- 
ing you hot tea biscuits of a most delicious sort. Other 
girls, this time in Neapolitan dress, are distributing 
flowers. The head-waiter bends over you and suggests 
the salad with which you start your dinner, for it seems 
to be the fashion in San Francisco restaurants to eat 
your salad before your soup. The restaurant is a gay 
place, crowded. Late-comers must find their way else- 
where. And the food is surprisingly good. 

But we best remember a little restaurant just back of 
the California market in Pine street — into which we 
stumbled of a Saturday night just about dinner-time. It 
was an unpretentious place, with two musicians fiddling 
for dear life in a tiny balcony. But the table d'hote — 
price one dollar, with a bottle of California wine after 
the fashion of all San Francisco table d'hotes — was 
perfection, the special dishes which the waiter suggested 
even finer. Sonpe I'oignon that might linger in the 



302 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

mind for a long time, a marvelous combination salad, 
chicken bonne femme — which translated meant a 
chicken pulled apart, then cooked with artichokes in a 
casserole, the whole smothered with a wonderful brown 
gravy — there was a dinner, absolute in its simplicity 
yet leaving nothing whatsoever to be wished. And a 
long time later we read that Maurice Baring, author and 
globe-trotter, had visited the place and pronounced its 
cookery the finest that he had ever tasted. 

There are dozens of such little places in San Francisco 
— named after the fashion of its shops in grotesque or 
poetic fashion — and they are almost all of them good. 
There is little excuse for anything else in a town whose 
very cosmopolitanism proclaims real cooks in the making, 
whose wharves are rubbed by smack and schooner bring- 
ing in the food treasures of the sea, whose farms are vast 
truck gardens for the land, whose markets run riot in 
the richest of edibles. Your San Franciscan is nothing 
if not an epicure. It is hardly fair, however, to assume 
that he is a glutton or that he merely lives to eat. For 
he is, in reality, so very much more — optimistic, 
generous, brave — and how he does delight to experi- 
ment. California is still in the throes of what seems to 
be a social and political earthquake, with each shake 
growing a little more rough than its predecessor. She 
has just overturned most of her political ideals for the 
first fifty years of her life. She delights in politics. 
She really lives. San Francisco, standing between those 
two great schools of thought, the University of Cali- 
fornia at Berkeley, and Leland Stanford University at 
Palo Alto, prides herself upon her growing intellectuality. 
From the folk who dally with advanced thought of every 
sort down to those who are merely puzzled and dissatis- 
fied, the population of this Calif ornian metropolis de- 
mands a new order of things. That as much as anything 
else explains the recent political revolutions. Since the 




The Mission Dolores— San Francisco 



SAN FRANCISCO 303 

great fire, the plans for those revolutions have been under 
progress. 

The mention of that fire — if you make any pretense 
to diplomacy you must never call it an earthquake around 
the Golden Gate — brings us back to the San Francisco 
of today. You look up and down Market street for 
traces of that fire — and in vain. The city looks modern, 
after the fashion of cities of the American west, but its 
buildings do not seem to have arisen simultaneously 
after the scourge that leveled them — simultaneously. 
But turn off from Market street, to the south through 
Second or Third streets or north through any of the 
parallel throughfares that lead out of that same main- 
stem of San Francisco. 

Now the fullness of that disaster — which was not 
more to you at the time than the brilliancy of news- 
paper dispatches — comes liome to you for the first time. 
In the rear of your hotel is an open square of melan- 
choly ruins, below it a corner plat still waste, others be- 
yond in rapid succession. On the side streets, fragments 
of " party-walls," a bit of crumbling arch, a stout stand- 
ing chimney remind you of the San Francisco that was 
and that can never be again. When you go out Market 
street, you may see where stood the pretentious City 
Hall — today a stretch of foundation-leveled ruins with 
a single surviving dome still devoted to the business of 
the Hall of Records. Still, to get the fullness of the 
disaster you must make your way into San Fran- 
cisco's wonderful Golden Gate Park, past the single 
standing marble doorway of the old Towne house — a 
pathetic reminder of one of the great houses of the old 
San Francisco — and straight up to the crest of the high 
lifted Strawberry Hill. On that hill there stood until the 
eighteenth of April, 1906, a solid two-storied stone ob- 
servatory. It seemed to be placed there for all time, but 
today it vaguely suggests the Coliseum of Rome — a half 



304 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

circle of its double row of arches still standing but the 
weird ruin bringing back the most tragic five minutes that 
an American city has ever spent. Or if you will go a 
little farther, an hour on a quick-moving suburban train 
will bring you to Palo Alto and the remains of Leland 
Stanford University, that remarkable institution whose 
museum formerly held whole cases of Mrs. Stanford's 
gowns and a papiep-mache reproduction of a breakfast 
once eaten by a member of her family. 

It must be discouraging to try to bring order out of 
the chaos that was wreaked there. The great library, 
which was wrecked within a month of its completion, 
and the gymnasium have never been rebuilt, although 
the dome of the latter is still held aloft on stout steel sup- 
ports. The chapel, which was Mrs. Stanford's great 
pride and for which she made so many sacrifices still 
rears its crossing. Nave and transepts, to say nothing of 
the marvelous mosaics, were leveled in the twinkling of 
that April dawn. The long vistas of arched pergolas, 
the triumph of the master, Richardson, still remain. 
And the ruin done in that catastrophe to the high-sprung 
arch he placed over the main entrance to the quadrangle 
has been in part eradicated. 

For Leland Stanford University today represents one 
of the bravest attempts ever made in this land to repair 
an all but irreparable loss. It has never lost either faith 
and hope, and so the visitor to its campus today will 
see the beginnings toward a complete replacement of 
the buildings of what was one of the " show universi- 
ties " of the land. With a patience that must have been 
infinite, the stones of the old chapel have been sorted out 
of the ruin — even fragments of the intricate mosaics 
have been carefully saved — numbered and placed in se- 
quence for re-erection. Already the steel frame of nave 
and transepts is up again and the tedious work of erect- 
ing the masonry walls upon it begun. Leland Stanford 



SAN FRANCISCO 305 

has, quite naturally, caught the spirit of San Francisco 
— the city that would not be defeated. 

To analyze that spirit in a sweeping paragraph is all 
but impossible. Incident upon incident will show it in 
all its phases. For instance, there was in San Francisco 
on the morning of the earthquake a sober-minded Ger- 
man citizen who had put his all into a new business — 
a business that had just begun to prove the wisdom of 
his investment. When Nature awoke from her long 
sleep and stretching began to rock the city by the Golden 
Gate the German rushed upstairs to where his wife and 
daughter slept. He found them in one another's arms 
and frantic with terror. 

" Papa ! Papa ! " they shrieked. " We are going to 
die. It is the end of the world — the business is gone. 
We are going to die ! " 

He smiled quietly at them. 

" Well, what of it ? " he asked quietly. " We die to- 
gether — and in San Francisco." 

A keen-witted business man once boasted that he could 
capitalize sentiment, express the spirit of the human soul 
in mere dollars and cents. What price could he give 
for a love and loyalty of that sort? That was, and still 
is, the afifection that every San Franciscan from the 
ferry-house back to the farthest crest of the uppermost 
hill gives to his city — it is the thing that makes her one 
of the few American towns that possess distinctive per- 
sonality. 

A young matron told us of her own experience on the 
morning of the fire. 

" Of course it was exciting," she said, " with the smoke 
rolling up upon us from downtown, and the rumors re- 
peating themselves that the disaster was world-wide, that 
Chicago was in ruins and New York swallowed by a 
tidal wave, but there was nothing unreal about a single 
bit of it. I bundled my children together and hurried 



sob PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

toward the Presidio — my knowledge of army men as- 
sured me that there could be no danger there. I took 
the little tent handed me and set up my crude house-keep- 
ing in it. It still seemed very real and not so very dif- 
ficult. 

" But when those odd little newspapers — that had 
been printed over in Oakland — came, and I saw the 
first of their head-lines ' San Francisco in Ruins ' then 
it came upon me that our city, my city, was no more, and 
it was all over. It was all the most unreal thing in the 
world and I cried all that night, not for a single loss 
beyond that of the San Francisco that I had loved. 
But the next morning they told me how they had tele- 
graphed East for all the architects in sight, and that morn- 
ing I began planning a new house just as if it had been 
a pet idea for months and months and months. . . ." 

Out of such men and women a great city is ever 
builded. San Francisco may be wild and harum-scarum, 
and a great deal of its wildness is painfully exaggerated, 
but it is a mighty power in itself. Your San Franciscan 
is rightly proud of the progress made since the great dis- 
aster. More than $375,000,000 — a sum approximating 
the cost of the Panama canal — has already been spent 
in rebuilding the city, and now, like a man who has 
spent his last dollar on a final substantial meal, the west- 
ern metropolis calls for cake and scrapes up an additional 
$18,000,000 for a World's Fair " to beat everything that 
has gone before." That takes financing — of a high or- 
der. It takes something more. It has taken a real 
spirit — enthusiasm and love and courage — to build a 
new San Francisco that shall gradually obliterate the 
poignant memories of the city that was. 



20 

BELFAST IN AMERICA 

ONCERNING Toronto it may be said that she 
combines in a somewhat unusual fashion British 
conservatism and American enterprise. Her neat streets 
are lined with solid and substantial buildings such as de- 
light the heart of the true Briton wherever he may find 
them ; and yet she has among these " the tallest sky- 
scraper of the British Empire," although the sixteen 
stories of its altitude would be laughed to scorn by many 
a second-class American city. 

Still, many a first-class American city could hardly 
afford to laugh at the growth of Toronto, particularly in 
recent years. She prides herself that she had doubled 
her population each fifteen years of her history and here 
is a geometrical problem of growth that becomes vastly 
more difficult with each oncoming twelvemonth. At the 
close of the second war of the United States with Eng- 
land, just a century ago, Toronto was a mere hamlet. 
Beyond it was an unknown wilderness. The town was 
known as York in those days, and although Governor 
Simcoe had already chosen the place to be the capital of 
Upper Canada, it was a struggling little place. Still, it 
must have struggled manfully, for in 1817 it was granted 
self-government and in 1834, having garnered in some 
nine thousand permanent residents, it was vested with 
a Mayor and the other appurtenances of a real city. 
Since then it has grown apace, until today in population 
and in financial resource it is very close upon the heels 
of Montreal, for so many years the undisputed metrop- 
olis of the Dominion. 

307 



3o8 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

But perhaps the spur that has advanced Toronto has 
been the knowledge that west of her is Wmnipeg, and 
that Winnipeg has been doubling her population each 
decade. And west of Winnipeg is Calgary, west of Cal- 
gary, Vancouver ; all growing apace until it is a rash man 
who today can prophesy which will be the largest city 
of the Dominion of Canada, a dozen years hence. The 
Canadian cities have certainly been growing in the Amer- 
ican fashion — to use that word in its broadest sense. 

And yet the strangest fact of all is that Toronto grows 
— not more American, but more British year by year. 
Within the past twelve or thirteen years this has become 
most marked. She has grown from a Canadian town, 
with many marked American characteristics, into a town 
markedly English in many, many ways. Now consider 
for a moment the whys and the wherefores of this. 

We have already told of the rapid progress of Toronto, 
now what of the folk who came to make it ? In the be- 
ginning there were the Loyalists — " Tories " we call 
them in our histories ; " United Empire Loyalists," as 
their Canadian descendants prefer to know them — who 
fled from the Colonies at the time of the Revolution and 
who found it cjuite impossible to return. In this way 
some of the old English names of Virginia have been 
perpetuated in Toronto, and you may find in one of the 
older residential sections, a great house known as Bev- 
erly, whose doors, whose windows, whose fireplaces, 
whose every detail are exact replicas of the Beverly 
House in Virginia which said good-by to its proprietors 
a century and a half ago. 

Those Loyalists laid the fovmdations of Toronto of 
today. The municipality of Toronto of today is, as you 
shall see, most progressive in the very fibers of its being, 
ranking with such cities as Des Moines and Cleveland 
and Boston as among the best governed upon the North 
American continent. Such civic progress was not 



TORONTO 309 

drawn from the cities of England or of Scotland or of 
Ireland. And Toronto was a well organized and gov- 
erned municipality, while Glasgow and Manchester were 
hardly yet emerging from an almost feudal servility. Be- 
cause in Toronto the old New England town-meeting idea 
worked to its logical triumph. The Loyalists who had 
left their great houses of Salem and of Boston brought 
more to the wildernesses of Upper Canada than merely 
fine clothes or family plate. 

To this social foundation of the town came, as stock 
for her growth through the remaining three-quarters of 
the nineteenth century, the folk of the north of Ireland. 
The southern counties of the Emerald Island gave to 
America and gave generously — to New York and to 
Boston ; to New Brunswick and to Lower Canada. The 
men from the north of Ireland went to Toronto and the 
nearby cities of what is now the Province of Ontario. 
And when Toronto became a real city they began to call 
her the Belfast of America. For such she was. She 
was a very citadel of Protestantism. Her folk trans- 
planted, found that they would w^orship God in their 
austere churches without having the reproachful phrase 
of " dissenter " constantly whipped in their faces. To- 
ronto meant toleration. So came the Ulster men to their 
new Belfast. For more than sixty years they came — a 
great migrating army. And if you would know the way 
they took root give heed to a single illustration. 

One of these Irishmen had founded a retail store in the 
growing little city of Toronto. It thrived — tremen- 
dously. News of its success went back to the little north- 
of-Ireland village from whence its owner came. 

" Timothy Eaton's doin' well in America," was the word 
that passed through his old county. Timothy Eaton and 
those who came after him took good care of their kith 
and kin. For the Eaton business did prosper. To- 
day the firm has two great stores — one in Toronto and 



3IO PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

one in Winnipeg — and they are not only among the 
largest in North America but among the largest in the 
world. 

This is but one instance of the way that Toronto has 
grown. And when, after sixty years of steady immigra- 
tion there was little of kith and kin left to come from 
Ireland, there began a migration from the other side of 
the Irish channel, a new chapter in the growth of Toronto 
was opened. 

No one seems to know just how the tide of English 
emigration started, but it is a fact that it had its begin- 
ning about the time of the end of the Boer war. It is 
no less a fact that within ten or fifteen years it has at- 
tained proportions comparable with the sixty years of 
Irish immigration. The agents of the Canadian govern- 
ment and of her railroads have shown that it pays to 
advertise. 

There is good reason for this immigration — of course. 
Canada, with no little wisdom, has given great preference 
to the English as settlers. She has not wished to change 
her religions, her language or her customs. The English, 
in turn, have responded royally to the invitation to come 
to her broad acres and her great cities. The steamship 
piers, at Quebec and Montreal in the summer and at Hal- 
ifax and St. Johns in the winter, are steadily thronged 
with the newcomers, and they do not speak the strange 
tongues that one hears at Ellis island in the city of 
New York. They bring no strange customs or strange 
religions to the growing young nation that prides herself 
upon her ability to combine conservatism and progress. 

And just as Toronto once did her part in depopulating 
the north of Ireland, so today is the Province of Ontario 
and the country to the west of it draining old England. 
It is related that one little English village — Dove Holes 
is its name and it is situate in Derbyshire — has been 
sadly depleted in just this fashion. Eight years ago 



TORONTO 311 

and it boasted a population of 1250 persons. Today 500 
of that number are in America — a new village of their 
own right in the city of Toronto, if you please — and 
Dove Holes awaits another Goldsmith to sing of its 
saddened charms. One resident came, the others fol- 
lowed in his trail to a land that spelled both oppor- 
tunity and elbow-room. Your real Englishman of so- 
called middle class, even gentlemen of the profes- 
sion or service in His Majesty's arms, seem to have 
one consuming passion. It is to cross Canada and live 
and die in the little West Coast city of Victoria. Vic- 
toria stands on Vancouver island and they have begun to 
call Vancouver island, " Little England." In its warm, 
moist climate, almost in its very conformation, it is a 
replica of the motherland of an Englishman's ideal ; a 
motherland with everything annoying, from hooliganism 
to suffragettes, removed. 

But Victoria is across a broad continent as well as a 
broad sea, and so your thrifty emigrant from an English 
town picks Toronto as the city of his adoption. Winni- 
peg he deems too American ; Montreal, with her 
damnable French blood showing even in the street-signs 
and the car-placards, quite out of the question. But 
Toronto does appeal to him and so he comes straight to 
her. There are whole sections of the town that are be- 
ginning to look as if they might have been stolen from 
Birmingham or Manchester or Liverpool — even London 
itself. The little red-brick houses with their neat, small 
windows are as distinctively British as the capped and 
aproned house-maids upon the street. In the States it 
takes a mighty battle to make a maid wear uniform upon 
the street. In Toronto it is not even a question for argu- 
ment. The negro servant, so common to all of us, is 
unknown. The service of the better grade of Toronto 
houses is today carefully fashioned upon the British 
model — even to meal hours and the time-honored 



312 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

English dishes upon the table. And in less aristocratic 
streets of the town one may see a distinctively British 
institution, taken root and apparently come to stay. It 
is known as a " fish and chip shop " and it retails fried 
fish and potato chips, already cooked and greasy enough 
to be endearing to the cockney heart. 

Remember also that the city upon the north shore of 
Lake Ontario is an industrial center of great importance. 
You cannot measure the tonnage of Toronto harbor as 
you measured the harbor of Cleveland — alongside of 
the greatest ports of the world — for Ontario is the 
lonely sister of the five Lakes. No busy commercial 
fleet treks up and down her lanes. But Toronto is a 
railroad center of increasing importance; they are still 
multiplying the lines out from her terminals and, as we 
have just intimated, she is a great and growing manu- 
facturing community. Her industrial enterprises have 
been hungry for skilled and intelligent men. They have 
gradually drafted their ranks from the less-paid trades 
of the town. Into these places have come the men from 
the English towns. The street cars are manned by men 
of delightful cockney accent, they drive the broad flat 
" lourries," as an Englishman likes to call a dray, they 
fit well into every work that requires brawn and endur- 
ance rather than a high degree of intellectual effort. 

Just how this invasion will affect the Toronto of to- 
morrow no one seems willing to prophesy. The men 
from Glasgow and from Manchester are used to munic- 
ipal street railroads and such schemes and the New 
England town-meeting ideas, which were the products 
of Anglo-Saxon spirit, come home to rest in English 
hearts. The street railroad system of Toronto may 
groan under its burden — it is paying over a million dol- 
lars this year to the city and is constantly threatened with 
extinction as a pjivate corporation. But the Englishman 



TORONTO 313 

of that city merely grunts at the bargains it offers — six 
tickets for a quarter ; eight in rush-hours, ten for school 
children and seven for Sabbath riding, all at the same 
price — and wonders " why the nawsty trams canna' do 
better by a codger that's workin' like a navvie all the 
day?" 

Toronto will see that they do better — that is her 
vision into the future. But just how the new blood is to 
infuse into some of the Puritan ideas of the town — 
there is another question. Here is a single one of the 
new puzzling points — the temperance problem. It was 
not so very long ago that Canada's chief claim for fame 
rested in the excellence of her whiskey — and that des- 
pite the fact that the Canadian climate is ill-adapted to 
whiskey drinking. The twelfth of July — which you 
will probably recall as the anniversary of the battle of 
the Boyne — used to be marked by famous fights, which 
invariably had marine foundations in Canadian rye. 
However, during the past quarter of a century, the tem- 
perance movement has waxed strong throughout On- 
tario. Many cities have become " dry " and it is pos- 
sible that Toronto herself might have been without sa- 
loons today — if it had not been for the English invasion. 
For your Englishman regards his beer as food — " skittles 
and beer " is something more than merely proverbial — 
and he must have it. He looks complacently upon the 
stern Sabbath in Toronto — Sunday in an English city 
is rarely a hilarious occasion — but he must have his 
beer. Up to the present time he has had it. 

But these problems are slight compared with the prob- 
lem of assimilation of alien tongues and races, such as 
has come to New York within the past two decades. 
The Englishman is but a cousin to the Canadian after 
all, and he shows that by the enthusiasm with which he 
enters into her politics. He entered into Mr. Taft's 
pet reciprocity plan with an enthusiasm of a distinct 



314 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

sort. With all of his anti-American and pro-British 
ideas he leaped upon it. And when he had accomplished 
his own part in throttling that idea he exulted. Whether 
he will exult as much a dozen years hence over the de- 
feat of reciprocity is an open question. But the part that 
the transplanted Englishman in Canada played in that 
defeat is unquestioned, just as the part he is playing in 
providing her with useless Dreadnoughts for the defense 
of other lands is undisputed.* The Englishman is no 
small factor in Canadian politics ; he is a very great fac- 
tor in the political situation in the city of Toronto. 

Lest you should be bored by the politics of another 
land, turn your attention to the way the Toronto peo- 
ple live. They have formal entertainments a-plenty — 
dinners, balls, receptions — a great new castle is being 
built on the edge of Rosedale for a gubernatorial resi- 
dence and presumably for the formal housing of roy- 
alty which often comes down from Ottawa. There 
are theaters and good restaurants, and no matter what 
you may say about her winters, the Canadian summers 
are delightful. For those who must go, there are the 
Muskoka Lakes within easy reach, Georgian bay and the 
untrod wildernesses beyond. But if we lived in Toronto, 
we think we should stay at home and enjoy that wonder- 
ful lake. There are yacht-clubs a-plenty alongside it, 
bathing beaches, sailing, canoeing — the opportunity for 
variety of sport is wide. In the milder seasons of the 
year there is golf and baseball, football, or even cricket, 
and in the wintertime tobogganing and snowshoeing and 
iceboating. No wonder that the cheeks of the Toronto 
girls are pink with good health. 

In the autumn there is the big fair — officially the 
Canadian National Exhibition — which has grown from 
a very modest beginning into a real institution. Last 

* This plan is temporarily blocked in Canada, whose enthusiasm 
for Dreadnoughts seems to be waning. E. H. 



TORONTO 315 

year nearly a million persons entered its gates, there 
were more than a hundred thousand admissions upon a 
single very big day. Delegations of folk came from as 
far distant as Australia — there were special excursion 
rates from all but three of the United States. It is not 
only a big fair but a great fair, still growing larger with 
each annual exhibition. Toronto folk are immensely 
proud of it and give to it loyalty and support. And the 
Canadian government is not above gaining a political 
opportunity from it. We remember one autumn at To- 
ronto three or four years ago seeing a great electric sign 
poised upon one of the main buildings. It was a moving 
sign and the genius of the electrician had made the sem- 
blance of a waving British banner. Underneath in 
fixed and glowing letters you might read: 

ONE FLAG, ONE KING, ONE NATION 

To see Toronto as a British city, however, you must 
go to her in May — at the time of her spring races. 
The fair is very much like any of the great fairs in the 
United States. The race-meet is distinctly different. 
In the United States horse-racing has fallen into ill- 
repute, and most of the famous tracks around our larger 
cities have been cut up into building lots. The sport 
with us was commercialized, ruined, and then practically 
forbidden. In Canada they have been wiser, although 
the tendency to make the sport entirely professional and 
so not sport at all has begun to show itself even over 
there. But in Toronto they go to horse-races for the 
love of horse-racing, and not in the hopes of making a 
living without working for it. 

The great spring race-meet is the gallop for the King's 
Guineas. It is at the Woodbine and in addition to being 
the oldest racing fixture in America it is also just such 
a day for Canada as Derby Day is for England. If you 



3i6 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

go to Toronto for Plate Day — as they call that great 
race-day — you will be wise to have your hotel accom- 
modations engaged well in advance. You will find Plate 
Day to be the Saturday before the twenty-fourth of May. 
And, lest you should have forgotten the significance of the 
twenty-fourth of May, permit us to remind you that for 
sixty-four long years loyal Canada celebrated that day as 
the Queen's birthday. And it is today, perhaps, the most 
tender tribute that the Canadians can render Victoria — 
their adherence to her birthday as the greatest of their na- 
tional holidays. 

If you are wise and wish to see the English aspect of 
Toronto, you will reserve your accommodations at a cer- 
tain old hotel near the lakefront which is the most in- 
tensely British thing that will open to a stranger within 
the town. Within its dining-room the lion and the uni- 
corn still support the crown, and the old ladies who are 
ushered to their seats wear white caps and gently pat 
their flowing black skirts. The accents of the employes 
are wonderfully British, and if you ask for pens you 
will surely get " nibs." The old house has an air, which 
the English would spell " demeanour," and incidentally 
it has a wonderful faculty of hospitality. 

From it you will drive out to the track, and if you elect 
you can find seats upon a tally-ho, drawn by four or 
six horses, properly prancing, just as they prance in old 
sporting-prints. Of course, there are ungainly motor- 
cars, like those in which the country folk explore Broad- 
way, New York, but you will surely cling to the tally-ho. 
And if your tally-ho be halted in the long and dusty pro- 
cession to the track to let a coach go flying by, if that 
coach be gay in gilt and color, white-horsed, postilioned, 
if rumor whispers loudly, " It's the Connaughts — the 
Governor-General, you know," you will forget for that 
moment your socialistic and republican ideas, and strain 



TORONTO 317 

your old eyes for a single fleeting glimpse of bowing 
royalty. 

For royalty drives to Plate Day just as royalty drives 
to Ascot. Its box, its manners and its footmen are 
hardly less impressive. And in the train of royalty 
comes the best of Toronto, not the worst. Finely 
dressed women, jurists, doctors, bankers — the list is 
a long, long one. And in their train in turn the artisans. 
The plumber who tinkers with the pipes in your hotel 
in the morning has a dollar up on the " plate," so has the 
porter who handles your trunk, so have three-quarters 
of the trolley-car men of the town — and yet they are 
not gamblers. The " tout " who used to be a disagree- 
able and painfully evident feature of New York racing 
is missing. So are the professional gamblers, the betting 
being on the pari-mutuel system. And the man who 
loses his dollar because he failed to pick the winning 
horse feels that he has lost it in a patriotic cause. It 
should be worth a miserable dollar to see royalty come to 
the races in a coach. 

From Toronto we will go to her staunch French rival, 
Montreal. If we are in the midsummer season we may 
go upon a very comfortable steamer, down the lonely 
Ontario and through the beauties of the Thousand Is- 
lands. And at all seasons we will find the railroad ride 
from Toronto filled with interest, with glimpses of lake 
and river, with the character of the country gradually 
changing, the severe Protestant churches giving way to 
great tin-roofed Roman churches, holding their crosses 
on high and gathering around their gray-stone walls the 
houses of their little flocks. 



21 

WHERE FRENCH AND ENGLISH MEET 

OUR hotel faces a little open square and in the 
springtime of the year, when the trees are barely 
budding, we can still see the sober gray-stone houses on 
the far side of the square, each with its brightly colored 
green blinds. At one is the " Dentiste," at another the 
" Avocat," a third has descended to a pension with its 
" Chamber d'Louer." There are shiny brass signs on 
the front of each of these three old houses, and every 
morning at seven-thirty o'clock three trim little French 
Canadian maids attack the signs vigorously with their 
wiping cloths. Then we know that it is time to get up. 
By the same fashion we should be shaved and ready for 
our marmalade and bacon and eggs as the regal carrier 
of the King's mail trots down the steps of the French 
consulate and rings at the area door of the neighboring 
" Conservatoire Musicale." In a very little time that row 
of houses across the Place Viger Gardens has become a 
factor in our very lives. It is the starting-point of our 
days. 

In the morning, when the marmalade and the bacon 
and eggs are finished, we step out into the Gardens for 
the first breath of crisp fresh air of the north. There 
is a line of wonderful cabs waiting at its edge, and a 
prompt driver steps forward from each to solicit our 
patronage. The cab system of Montreal is indeed 
wonderful — it first shows to the stranger within that 
city's gates its remarkable continental character. For 
you seemingly can ride and ride and ride — and then 

318 



MONTREAL 319 

some more — and the cabby tips his hat at a quarter or 
a half a dollar. He has an engaging way of smiling 
at you at the end of the trip, and leaving it to you as 
to what he gets. You can trust to the Montreal cabby's 
sense of fairness and he seems to feel that he can trust 
to yours. But that is not all quite as altruistic as it 
may seem at first glance. Back of the cabby's smile is 
the unsmiling, sober sense of justice always existent in 
a British city, and it is that which really keeps the Mon- 
treal cab service as efficient as it really is, as cheap and 
as accessible. For at every one of the almost innumerable 
open squares of the city, are the cab-stands, the long line 
of patiently waiting carriages, and the little kiosk from 
which they can be summoned. It is all quite simple and 
complete and an ideal toward which metropolitan New 
York may be aspiring but has never reached. 

On sunny mornings we scorn the cabs and stroll across 
the Gardens. Sometimes we drop for a moment on one 
of the clumsily comfortable benches under the shade of 
the Canadian maples, and glance at the morning paper — 
a ponderous sheet much given to the news of Ottawa 
and London, discoursing upon the work of two Parlia- 
ments, but only granting grudging paragraphs to the 
news of a home-land, scarce sixty miles distant. That is 
British policy, the straining policy of trying to make a 
unified nation of lands separated from one another by 
broad seas. That England has done it so well is the 
marvel of strangers who enter her dominions. Mon- 
treal is loyal to her mother land, despite some local in- 
fluences which we shall see in a moment. A surprising 
number of her citizens go back and forth to the little 
island that governs her, once or twice or three times a 
year. There are thousands of business men in the me- 
tropolis of Canada who know Pall Mall or Piccadilly far 
more intimately than either Wall street or Times square 



320 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

— and New York is but a night's ride from Montreal. 
So much can carefully directed sentiment accomplish. 

The paths that lead from the Gardens are varied and 
fascinating. One stretches up a broad and sober street 
to Ste. Catherine's, the great shopping promenade of the 
town, where the girls are all bound west toward the big 
shops that stretch from Phillips to Dominion squares 

— another at the opposite direction three blocks to the 
south and the harbor-front, a wonderful place now in a 
chaos of transformation that is going to make Montreal 
the most efficient port in the world. We can remember 
the water-front of the old town as it first confronted us 
a quarter of a century ago, after a long all-day trip down 
the rapids of the upper St. Lawrence — back of the gay 
shipping a long stretch of sober gray limestone build- 
ings, accented by numerous domes, the joy of every 
British architect, the long straight front of Bonsecours 
market, the little spire of Bonsecours church, and 
the two great towers of Notre Dame rising above 
it all. There was a curving wall of stone along the 
quay street and it all seemed quite like the geography 
pictures of Liverpool, or was it Marseilles? 

Nowadays that quiet prospect is gone. A great water- 
side elevator of concrete rises almost two hundred and 
fifty feet into the air from the quay street; there are 
other elevators nearly as large and nearly as sky-scrap- 
ing, a variety of grim and covered piers and the man 
from a boat amidstream hardly catches even a glimpse 
of Notre Dame or Bonsecours. And Montreal gave 
up her glimpses of the river that she loves so passion- 
ately, not without a note of regret ; the market-men gently 
protested that they could no longer sit on the portico 
of the Bonsecours and see the brisk activity of the har- 
bor. But Montreal realizes the importance of her har- 
bor to her. She is a thousand miles inland from " blue 
water " and for five months of the year her great 



I 



MONTREAL 321 

strength giving river is tightly frozen ; despite these ob- 
stacles she has come within the past year to be the most 
efficient port in the world, and among twelve or four- 
teen of the greatest. And commercial power is a laurel 
branch to any British city. 

There are other paths that lead from Place Viger Gar- 
dens — that lead on and on and to no place in particular, 
but all of them are filled with constant interest. The 
side streets of Montreal are fascinating. Their newer 
architecture is apt to be fantastic, ofttimes incongruous, 
but there are still many graystone houses in that simple 
British style that is still found throughout the older Can- 
ada, all the way from Halifax to the Detroit river. 
There are the inevitable maple trees along the curbs that 
make Montreal more of a garden city than unobservant 
travelers are apt to fancy it. And then there are the 
institutions, wide-spreading and many-winged fellows, 
crowned with the inevitable domes and shielded from the 
vulgarity of street traffic by high-capped walls. These 
walls are distinctive of Montreal. Often uncompromis- 
ing, save where some gentle vine runs riot upon their 
lintels and laughs at their austerity, they are broken here 
and there and again by tightly shut doors, doors that 
open only to give forth on rare occasions ; to let a som- 
ber file of nuns or double one of cheaply uniformed 
children pass out into a sordid and sin-filled world, and 
then close quickly once again lest some of its contamina- 
tions might penetrate the gentle and unworldly place. 
And near these great institutions are the inevitable 
churches, giant affairs — parish churches still dominating 
the sky-line of a town which is just now beginning to 
dabble in American skyscrapers, and standing ever 
watchful, like a mother hen brooding and protecting her 
chicks. These chance paths often lead to other squares 
than the Gardens of the Place Viger — squares which in 
spring and in summer are bright green carpets spread 



322 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

in little open places in the heart and length and breadth 
of the city, and which are surrounded by more of the 
solid graystone houses with the green blinds. When we 
go from Montreal we shall remember it as a symphony 
of gray and green — remember it thus forever and a 
day. 

But best of all we like the path that leads from the 
Place Viger west through the very heart of the old city 
and then by strange zig-zags, through the banking cen- 
ter, Victoria square, Beaver Hall Hill and smart Ste. 
Catherine's to Dominion square and the inevitable after- 
noon tea of the British end of the town. We turn from 
our hotel and the great new railroad terminal that it 
shelters, twist through a narrow street — picturesquely 
named the Champ d'Mars — and follow it to the plain 
and big City Hall and Court House. They are uninter- 
esting to us, but across the busy way of Notre Dame street 
stands the Chateau de Ramezay, a long, low, white- 
washed building, which has had its part in the making of 
Montreal. This stoutly built old house was built in 1705 
by Claude de Ramezay, Governor of Montreal, and was 
occupied by him for twenty years while he planned his 
campaigns against both English and Indians. Then for 
a time it was the headquarters of the India company's 
trade in furs, and for a far longer time after 1759 the 
home of a succession of British governors. Americans 
find their keenest interest in the Chateau de Ramezay, 
in the fact that it was in its long rambling low-ceilinged 
rooms that Benjamin Franklin set up his printing-press, 
away back during the days of the first unpleasantness 
between England and this country. After that, all was 
history, the Chateau was again the Government House 
of the old Canada — until Ottawa and the new Domin- 
ion came into existence. Nowadays, it faces one of the 
busiest streets of a busy city — and is not of it. It is 
like a sleeping man by the roadside, who, if he might 



MONTREAL 323 

awake once more, could spin at length the romances of 
other days and other men. 

Beyond the Chateau de Ramezay is' a broad and open 
market street that stretches from the inevitable Nelson 
monument, that is part and pride of every considerable 
British city, down to that same water-front, just now in 
process of transformation. Sometimes on a Tuesday or 
a Friday morning we have come to the place early enough 
to see the open-air market of Montreal, one of the heri- 
tages of past to present that seems little disturbed with 
the coming and the passing of the years. Shrewd shop- 
pers coming out of the solid stone mass of the Bonsecours 
pause beside the wagons that are backed along the broad- 
flagged sidewalks. The country roundabout Montreal 
must be filled with fat farms. One look at the wagons 
tells of low moist acres that have not yet lost their fer- 
tility. And sometimes the market women bring to the 
open square hats of their own crude weaving, or little 
carved crosses, or even bunches of delicate wild-flowers 
and sell them for the big round Canadian pennies. 
There is hardly any barterable article too humble for this 
market-place, and with it all the clatter of small sharp 
pleasant talk between a race of small, sharp, pleasant 
folk. 

From the market-place leading out from before the 
ugly City Hall and the uninteresting Court House, our 
best walk leads west through Notre Dame street up to 
the nearby Place d'Armes. It is a very old street of 
a very old city and even if the history of the town did 
not tell us that some of the old houses, staunch fellows 
every one of them, high-roofed and dormered, with their 
graystone walls four and five feet thick and as rough and 
rugged as the times for which they were built, would 
convince us, of themselves. They are fast going, these 
old fellows, for Montreal has entered upon boom times 
with the multiplication of transcontinental railroads 



324 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

across Canada. But it seems but yesterday that they 
could point to us in the Place d'Armes the very house 
in which lived LaMothe Cadillac, the founder of De- 
troit, nearby the house of Sieur Duluth. Montreal 
seems almost to have been the mother of a continent. 

It is in this Place d'Armes, this tiny crowded square 
in the center of the modern city, hardly larger than the 
garden of a very modest house indeed, that so many of 
the romantic memories of the old Montreal cluster. With 
the great church that has thrust its giant shadow across 
it for more than three quarters of a century, the Place 
d'Armes has been the heart of Montreal since the days 
when it was a mere trading post, a collection of huts at 
the foot of the lowest rapids of the mighty river. Much 
of the old Montreal has gone, even the citadel at the west 
end of the town gave way years ago to Dalhousie square, 
which in turn gave way to the railroad yards of the 
Place Viger terminals. But the Place d'Armes will re- 
main as long as the city remains. 

At its northwest corner is the colonnaded front of the 
Bank of Montreal, one of the finest banking-homes in 
Canada. 

" It is the great institution of this British Dominion," 
says a very old Canadian, whom we sometimes meet in 
the little square. " It is the greatest bank in North 
America." 

Offhand, we do not know as to the exact truth of that 
sweeping statement, but it is a certain fact that the Bank 
of Montreal is the greatest bank in all Canada, one of 
the greatest in the world, with its branches and rami- 
fications extending not only across a continent four 
thousand miles in width but also over two broad seas. 
To Montreal it stands as that famous " old lady of 
Threadneedle street " stands to London. 

" And yet," our Canadian friend continues, " right 



MONTREAL 325 

across the Place dWrmes here is an institution that 
could buy and sell the Bank of Montreal — or better 
still, buy it and keep it." 

Our eyes follow his pointing hand — to a long, low 
building on the south side of the little square. It is 
very old and exceeding quaint. Although built of the 
graystone of Montreal, brought by the soot of many years 
to almost a dead black, it seems of another land as well 
as of another time. Its quaint belfry with delicate clock- 
face and out-set hands is redolent of the south of France 
or Spain or even Italy. It does not seem a part and 
parcel of Our Lady of the Snows — and yet it is. 

"You know — the Seminary of St. Sulpice," says our 
Canadian friend. " It was the original owner of the 
rich island of Montreal. No one knows its wealth to- 
day, even after it has parted with many of its fee-holds. 
It still holds title to thousands of acres and no one save 
the Gentleman of the Corporation of St. Sulpice, them- 
selves, knows the wealth of the institution. To say that 
it is the richest ecclesiastical institution of the Americas 
is not enough, for here is an organization that for co- 
herency, wealth and strength surpasses Standard Oil 
and forms the chief financial support of the strongest 
church in the world." 

And this time we feel that our acquaintance of the 
Place d'Armes is not by any chance over-stepping the 
mark. In the quaint little Seminary that stands in the 
half-day shadow of the second largest church on the con- 
tinent — a church that it easily builded in the first third 
of the nineteenth century from its accumulated wealth 
— there centers much of the mystery of Montreal, a 
mystery which to the stranger takes concrete form in the 
high walls along the crowded streets, in whispered ru- 
mors of this force or that working within the politics 
of the city, in the so-called Nationalist movement, and 
flaunts itself in rival displays of Union Jack and the 



326 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

histopic Tricolor of France. There is little of mystery 
in the outer form of the Seminary. The quiet folk who 
live within those very, very old walls are hospitality it- 
self — even though their ascetic living is of the hardest, 
crudest sort. The only bed and carpeted room within 
the building is reserved for the occasional visits of 
bishop, or even higher church authority. But hidden 
from the street by the earliest part of the Seminary — 
almost unchanged since its erection in 1710 — and en- 
closed by a quadrangle of the fortress-like stone build- 
ings of the institution, is a most delicious garden with 
old-fashioned summer flowers and quaint statues of 
favored saints set in its shaded place. We remember a 
garden of the same sort at the mission of Santa Bar- 
bara, in California. These two are the most satisfac- 
tory gardens that we have ever seen. And it is from the 
rose-bushes in the Seminary of Montreal that one gets 
a full idea of the size and beauty of the exterior of the 
parish church of Notre Dame. Like so many of the 
cathedrals of Europe, it is so set as to have no satis- 
factory view-point from the street. 

And yet Notre Dame is one of the most satisfying 
churches that we have ever seen. It is not alone its size, 
not alone its wonderfully appropriate location facing that 
historic Place d'Armes, not any one of the interesting 
details of the great structure that comes to us, so much 
as the thing which the parish church typifies — the intact 
keeping of the customs, the language and the faith of a 
folk who were betrayed and deserted by their mother- 
land, more than a century and a half ago. One rarely 
hears the word of English spoken in the shadowy and 
worshipful aisles of Notre Dame. It is the babbling 
French that is the language of three-quarters of the resi- 
dents of Montreal. 

For there stands French, not only entrenched in the 
chief city of England's chief possession, but a language 



MONTREAL 327 

that, in the opinion of unprejudiced observers, gains 
rather than loses following each twelvemonth. There 
are reasons back of all this, and many of them too com- 
plicated and involved to be entered upon here. Suffice 
it to say here and now that the city school taxes are di- 
vided pro rata between Protestants and Roman Catholics 
for the conduct of their several schools of every sort. 
And that in most of the Catholic schools French is prac- 
tically the only language taught, a half-hour a day being 
sometimes given to English, whenever it is taught at all. 
The devotion of these French Canadians to their lan- 
guage is only second to their religion, and is closely inter- 
mingled with it. There is something pathetic and lov- 
able about it all that makes one understand why the 
habitans of a little town below Montreal tore down the 
English sign that the Dominion government erected over 
their Post Office, a year or so ago. And the Dominion 
government took the hint, made no fuss, but replaced 
its error with a French sign. Remember that there are 
more Tricolors floating in lower Canada than British 
Union Jacks. 

The signs of Montreal point the truth. Half of the 
street markers must be in English, half in French, just 
as the city government that places them divides its pro- 
ceedings, half in one language, half in the other. This 
even division runs to the street car transfers and notices, 
the flaring bulletins on sign-boards and dead-walls, even 
so stolid a British institution as the Harbor Commis- 
sioners giving the sides of its brigade of dock loco- 
motives evenly to the rival tongues. 

To attend high mass in Notre Dame is to make a 
memory well-nigh ineffaceable. It is to bring back in 
future years recollections of a great church, lifted from 
its week-day shadows by a wealth of dazzling incandes- 
cents, to be ushered past silent, kneeling figures to a 
stout pew, by a stout Siiissc in gaudy uniform ; to look 



328 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

to a high altar that stands afar and ablaze with candles, 
while priests and acolytes, by the hundreds, pass before 
it chanting, and the Cardinal sits aloft on his throne 
silent and in adoration ; to hear not a word of English 
from that high place or the folk who sit upon the great 
floor or in the two encircling galleries, but to catch the 
refrain of chant and of " Te Deum ; " these are the 
things that seem to make religion common to every man, 
no matter what his professed faith. And then, after it 
is all over, to come out of the shadows of the parish 
church into the brilliant sunshine of the Place d'Armes, 
the place where they once executed murderers under the 
old French law by breaking their backs and then their les- 
ser bones, and to hear Gros Bourdon sing his chant over 
the city from the belfry of Notre Dame — this is the old 
Montreal living in the heart of the new. They do not 
swing the great bell any more — for even Notre Dame 
grows old and its aged stones must be respected — but 
they toll it rapidly, in a sort of sing-song chant. We 
have stood in the west end of the town, three miles dis- 
tant from the Place d'Armes, and heard the rich, sweet 
tones of his deep throat come booming over the crowded 
city — a warning to a half a million folk to turn from 
worldier things to the thought of mighty God. 

Our best path leads west again from the Place d'Armes, 
past the newly reconstructed General Post Office, more 
stately banks here concentrating the wealth of the strong, 
new Canada; smart British-looking shops and restau- 
rants. In these last you may drink fine ales, munch at 
rare cheeses, of which Montreal is connoisseur, and eat 
rare roast beef done to a turn, with Yorkshire pudding, 
six days in a week. But you will look in vain for real 
French restaurants with their delectable cuisines. We 
have looked in vain in our almost innumerable trips to 
the city under the mountain. We have enlisted our 



MONTREAL 329 

friend Paul, who avers that he knows Montreal as he 
knows the fingers on his hand. Paul is a reporter on a 
French paper. He works not more than fourteen con- 
secutive hours on dull days, at a princely salary of nine 
dollars a week, and the rest of the time he is our enter- 
tainment committee — and an immense success at that. 
Paul has taught us a smattering of Montreal French, 
and he has shown us many curious places about the old 
city, but he has never found us a French restaurant that 
could even compare with some we know in the vicinity 
of West Twenty-seventh street in the city of New York. 
Sometimes he has come to us with mysterious hints of 
final success and we have girded our loins quickly to go 
with him. But when we have arrived it has been a place 
white-fronted like the dairy lunches off from Broadway, 
and we have never seen one of them without the listing 
of breakfast foods from Battle Creek, Michigan, mince- 
pie or other typical dishes from the States. And at 
Paul's rarest find we interviewed Monsieur le proprie- 
taire, only to have the dashing news that he had once 
served as second chef in the old Burnet House, in 
Cincinnati. There is, after all, a closer bond between 
two neighboring nations than either Ottawa or London 
is willing to admit and even Paul, loyal to his language 
and to his traditions, admits that. 

" Some day — some day," he dreams to us between 
cigarettes, " I am going down to see the Easter parade 
on Fifth avenue. Last year twelve thousand went from 
Montreal " — he chuckles — " and folks from Bordeaux 
ward looked at the swells from Westmount and thought 
they were real New Yorkers." 

And a little while later, between another change of 
cigarettes, he adds : 

" And I may not come back on my ticket. I under- 
stand — that reporters get fifteen or twenty dollars a 
week on the New York city papers." 



330 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

Paul's collar is impossible and his appetite for ciga- 
rettes fiendish, but he has ambitions. Perhaps he shares 
the ambitions of the city which, old in heart and tradi- 
tions, is new in enterprise and hope, and looks forward 
to being the mighty gateway of the greatest of all Eng- 
lish great possessions — a city filled with more than a 
million folk. 

We pass through the splendors of Victoria square and 
up the steep turn of Beaver Hall Hill into Phillips 
square and smart Ste. Catherine street. In a general 
way, the French element have preempted the eastern 
end of the city for themselves, while the English-speak- 
ing portion of the population clings to the section north 
and west of Phillips square and Ste. Catherine street 
right up to the first steep slopes of Mount Royal. This 
part of the city looks like any smart, progressive British 
town — with its fine Gothic Cathedral of the Church of 
England facing its showy main street, its exclusive clubs 
and its great hotels. And nowadays smart modern res- 
taurants are also crowding upon Ste. Catherine street, 
for modern Montreal will proudly tell you, and tell you 
again and again, that it is more continental, far more 
continental than London, which in turn is tightly bound 
down by the traditions of English conservatism. Mon- 
treal is not very literary — Toronto surpassing it in that 
regard — but it has a keen love of good paintings, good 
art of every sort. It ranks itself next to New York and 
Boston and among North American cities in this regard, 

" We are more proud of our public and private gal- 
leries," says the citizen of the town who sips tea at five 
o'clock with you in the lounge of the Windsor, " than 
we are of our New Yorkish restaurants that have im- 
ported themselves across the line within the past year or 
two. We have smiled at our daughters drifting in here 
for their tea on matinee afternoons, but dinners and 



MONTREAL 331 

American cocktails — well there are some sorts of re- 
ciprocity that we decidedly do not want." 

We understand. Montreal wants her personality, her 
rare and varied personality, preserved inviolate and in- 
tact. That is one great reason why she has cherished 
the pro-British habits of her press. New York is well 
enough for a trip — Montreal delights in our metropo- 
lis, as she does in our Atlantic City — as mere pleasure 
grounds, and the Easter hegira, in which Paul is yet to 
join, grows each year. But New York is New York, 
and Montreal must be Montreal. With her wealth of 
tradition, her peculiarly unique conservatism of two lan- 
guages and two great peoples working out their prob- 
lems in common sympathy, without conceding a single 
heritage, one to the other, the city of the gray and green 
must keep to her own path. 



22 

THE CITY THAT NEVER GROWS YOUNG 

HE stands, hat in hand, facing the city that honors 
his memory so greatly. To Samuel de la Cham- 
plain Quebec has not merely given the glory of what 
seems to us to be one of the handsomest monuments in 
America, but here and there in her quiet streets she 
brings back to the stranger within her walls recollections 
of the doughty Frenchman who braved an unknown sea 
to find a site for the city, which for more than three 
hundred years has stood as guardian to the north portal 
of America. Other adventurous sea spirits of those early 
days went chiefly in the quest of gold. Champlain had 
loftier ambitions within his heart. He hoped to be a 
nation-builder. And not only Quebec, but the great 
young-old nation that stands behind her, is his real monu- 
ment. 

Still, the artist's creation of bronze and of marble is 
effective — not alone, as we have already said, because 
of its own real beauty — but also very largely because 
of its tremendously impressive setting at the rim of the 
upper town — facing the tiny open square that as far 
back as two hundred and fifty years ago was the center 
of its fashionable life. Champlain in bronze looks at 
the tidy Place d'Armes — older residents of Quebec still 
delight in calling it the Ring — with its neat pathways 
of red brick and its low, splashing fountain, as if he 
longed to return to flesh and blood and walk through the 
little square and from it down some of the narrow streets 
that he may, himself, have planned in the days of old. 

332 



QUEBEC 333 

Or perhaps he would have chosen that once imposing 
main thoroughfare of Upper Town, St. Louis street, 
which out beyond the city wall has the even more dis- 
tinctive French title of the Grande Allee. We have 
chosen that main street many times ourselves, leading 
straight past the castellated gateways of the Chateau, 
fashioned less than a score of years ago by a master 
American architect — Mr. Bruce Price — and since 
grown very much larger, quite like a lovely girl still in 
her teens. On the other side of the street, close to the 
curb of the Place d'Armes, is the ever-waiting row of 
Victorias and caleches, whose drivers rise smilingly 
in their places even at the mere suggestion of a coming 
fare. Beyond these patient Jehus stands the rather or- 
dinary looking Court House, somewhat out of harmony 
with the architectural traditions of the town — and then 
we are plunged into the heart of as fascinating a street 
as one may hope to see in North America. It is clean 
— immaculate, if you please, after the fashion of all 
these hahitans of lower Canada — and it is bordered 
ever and ever so tightly by a double row of clean-faced 
stone houses, their single doors letting directly upon the 
sidewalk, and, also after the fashion of all Quebec, sur- 
mounted by steep pitched tin roofs and wonderfully fat 
chimneys, covered with tin in their turn. Quebec seems 
to have a passion for tin. It is her almost universal 
roofing, and in the bright sunshine, glittering with mirror- 
like brilliancy of contrast against the age-darkened 
stone walls, it has a charm that is quite its own. 

One of these old houses of St. Louis street sets 
well back from the sidewalk in a seeming riotous waste 
of front lawn, and bears upon its face a tablet denoting 
it as the one-time home of the Duke of Kent. This dis- 
tinguished gentleman lived in Quebec many years before 
he became father of Queen Victoria. In fact, Quebec 
remembers him as a rather gay young blade of a fellow 



334 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

who had innumerable mild affairs with the fascinating 
French-Canadian girls of the town. These things have 
almost become traditions among the older folk of the 
place. Those girls of Quebec town seem always to have 
held keen attractions for young blades from afar. When 
you turn down Mountain Hill and pass the General 
Post Ofifice with its quaint Golden Dog set in the facade, 
they will not only make you re-read that fascinating ro- 
mance of the old Quebec, but they will tell you that 
years after the Philiberts and the Repentignys were gone 
and the English were in full enjoyment of their rare 
American prize, that same old inn, upon whose front 
the gnawing dog was so securely set, was run by one 
Sergeant Miles Prentice, whose pretty niece, Miss Simp- 
son, so captivated Captain Horatio Nelson of His Maj- 
esty's Ship Albemarle that it became necessary for 
his friends to spirit away the future hero of Trafalgar 
to prevent him from marrying her. 

Beyond the old house of the Duke of Kent, St. Louis 
street is a narrow path lined by severe little Canadian 
homes all the way to the city gate. Many of these 
houses are fairly steeped in tradition. One tiny fellow 
within which the ancient profession of the barber still 
works is the house wherein Montcalm died. And to an- 
other, Benedict Arnold was taken in that ill-starred 
American attack upon Quebec. A third was a gift two 
centuries ago by the Intendant Bigot to the favored 
woman of his acquaintance. Romance does creep up 
and down the little steps of these little houses. They 
change hardly at all with the changing of the years. 

Here among them are the ruins of an old theater — 
its solid-stone fagade still holding high above the narrow 
run of pavement. It has been swept within by fire — 
the evil enemy that has fallen upon Quebec again and 
again and far more devastatingly than even the cannon 
that have bombarded her from unfriendly hands. 




d 



QUEBEC 335 

" Are they going to rebuild? " you may inquire, as you 
look at the stolid shell of the old theater. 

" Bless you, no," exclaims your guide. " The Music 
Hall was burned more than a dozen years ago. Quebec 
does not rebuild." 

But he is wrong. Quebec does rebuild, does progress. 
^ — Quebec progresses very slowly, but also very surely. 
■ To a man who returns after twenty years' absence from 
her quiet streets, the changes are most apparent. There 
are fewer caleches upon the street — those quaint two- 
wheeled vehicles which merge the joys of a Coney is- 
land whirly-coaster and the benefits of Swedish massage 
— although the drivers of these distinctive carriages still 
supply the American's keen demand for " local color " by 
shouting " marche done " to their stout and ugly little 
horses as they go running up and down the steep side- 
hill streets. Nowadays most tourists eschew the caleche 
and turn towards trolley cars. That of itself tells of 
the almost sinful modernization of Quebec. It is almost 
a quarter of a century since the electric cars invaded the 
narrow streets of the Upper Town, and in so doing 
caused the wanton demolition of the last of the older 
gates — Porte St. Jean. The destruction of St. Jean's 
gate was a mistake — to put the matter slightly. It 
came at a time when the question was being gently raised 
of the replacement of the older gates that had gone long 
before — Palace, Hope and Prescott. Nowadays but two 
of these portals remain, the St. Louis and the Kent 
gates, and these are not in architectural harmony with 
the solid British fortifications. 

Indeed, that is one of the great crimes to be charged 
against the modernization of Quebec. Other old towns 
in America have brought their architects to a clever 
sense of the necessity of making their newer buildings fit 
in absolute harmony with the older. They have clung 
jealously to their architectural personality. Quebec has 



336 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

missed that point. With the exception of the lovely Cha- 
teau which fits the traditions of the town, as a solitaire 
fits a ring setting, the newer buildings represent a 
strange hodge-podge of ideas. 

Quebec herself rather endures being quaint than en- 
joys it; for in this day of Canadian development she has 
dreamed of the future after the fashion of those insist- 
ent towns further to the west. It has not been pleasant 
for her to drop from second place in Canadian commer- 
cial importance to fourth or fifth. She has had to sit 
back and see such cities as Winnipeg, for instance, come 
from an Indian trading-place to a metropolitan center 
two or three times her size, while her own wharves rot. 
It is a matter of keen humiliation to the town every time 
a big ocean liner goes sailing up the river to Montreal • — 
her river, if you are to give ear to the protests of her 
citizens whom you meet along the Terrace of a late 
afternoon — without halting at her wharves, perhaps 
without even a respectful salute to the town which has 
been known these many years as the Gibraltar of 
America. 

So she has given herself to the development of trans- 
continental railroad projects. When one Canadian rail- 
road decided to use her as the summer terminal of its 
largest trans-Atlantic liners without sending those great 
vessels further up to Alontreal, Quebec saw quickly what 
that meant to her in prestige and importance. When 
the railroads told her, as politely as they might, that 
they could not develop her as a mighty traffic center be- 
cause of the broad arm of the St. Lawrence which 
blocked rail access from the South, she put her wits to- 
gether and set out to bridge that arm with the greatest 
cantilever in the world. The fall of the Quebec bridge 
five years ago with its toll of eighty lives, was a great 
blow to the commercial hopes of the town. But they 
have beojun to arise once more. The wreckage of that 



QUEBEC 337 

tragedy is already out of the way and the workmen are 
trying again, placing fresh foundations for the slender, 
far-reaching span that is going to mean so very much to 
the portal city of Canada. 

But progress has not robbed Quebec of her charm. 
It seems quite unlikely that such a brutal tragedy shall 
ever come. They may come as they did a year or two 
ago and tear down the impressive Champlain market — 
one of the very great lions of the Lower Town — but 
they do not understand the habitans from those back 
country villages around Quebec. Progress does not 
come to those obscure communities — no, not even 
slowly. The women still gather together at some moun- 
tain stream on wash-days and cleanse their laundry by 
placing it over flat rocks by the waterside and pounding 
it with wooden paddles, there are more barns roofed 
with thatch than with shingles, to say nothing of farms 
where a horse is an unknown luxury and men till the 
soil much as the soil was tilled in the days of Christ. 
From those places came the habitans to Champlain mar- 
ket — within my memory some of them in two-wheeled 
carts drawn by great Newfoundland dogs — and it was 
a gay place on at least two mornings of the week. One 
might buy if one pleased — bartering is a fine art to the 
French-Canadian and one dear to his soul — or one 
might pass to the next stall. But one could never pass 
very many stalls, with their bright offerings of food- 
stuffs or simple wearing apparels alike set in garniture of 
the brilliant flowers of this land of the short warm sum- 
mer. 

And now that the sturdy Champlain market is no 
more — literally torn apart, one stone from another — 
a few of these folk — typical of a North American race 
that refuses to become assimilated even after whole cen- 
turies of patient effort — still gather in the open square 



338 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

that used to face the market-house. They do not under- 
stand. There are only a few of them, and their little 
shows of wares are still individually brave, still indi- 
vidually gay. But even these must see that the folk with 
money no longer come to them. Perhaps they see and 
with stolid French-Canadian indifference refuse to ac- 
cept the fact. Such a thing would be but characteristic 
of a folk, who, betrayed and forgotten by their home- 
land for a little more than one hundred and fifty years, 
still cling not merely to their religion, but to traditions 
and a language that is alien to the land that shelters 
them. In Montreal the traveler from the States first 
finds French all but universal, the hardy Tricolor of 
France flying from more poles than boast British Union 
Jacks. In Quebec that fe^iling is intensified. We 
hunted through the shops of the town for a British 
standard, and in vain. But every one of the obliging 
shop-keepers was quick to offer us the flag of France. 
And the decorative motif of the modern architecture of 
new Quebec lends itself with astonishing frequency to 
the use of the lilies of old France. 

" It is that very sort of thing that makes Britain the 
really great nation that she is,'' an old gentleman told us 
one afternoon on the Terrace. We had been discussing 
this with him, and he had told us how the city records 
of Quebec — a British seaport town — were kept in 
French, how even the legislative proceedings in the great 
new parliament building out on the Grande Allee beyond 
the city wall were in that same prettily flavored tongue. 
" Yes, sir," he continued, " we may have a King that is 
English in title and German in blood, sir, but here in 
Canada we have one who through success and through 
defeat is more than King — Sir Wilfred Laurier — our 
late premier, sir." 

We liked the old gentleman's spunk. He was typical 
of the old French blood as it pulses within the new 



QUEBEC 339 

France. We liked the old gentleman, too. To us he 
was as one who had just stepped from one of Honore 
Balzac's stories, with his mustaches, waxed and dyed 
into a drooping perfection, his low-set soft hat, his vast 
envelope of a faded greatcoat, his cane thrust under his 
arm, as Otis Skinner might have done it. We had first 
met him one morning coming out of the arched gateway 
of the very ancient whitewashed pile of the Seminary; 
again as he stepped from his morning devotions out 
through the doorway of the Basilica into the sunlight of 
what was once the market-square of the Upper Town — 
after that many more times. Finally we had risked a 
little smile of recognition, to be answered by the salute 
courtly. We had conquered. We knew that romance 
personified was close to him. Perhaps our old gentle- 
man was an army man ; he must have been able to sit 
on the long porch of the Garrison Club, that delectable 
and afternoon-teable place that looks out upon the trim 
grass-carpeted court-yard, and tell stories at least as 
far back as the Crimea. 

"A Frenchman? " you begin, as if attacking the very 
substance of our argument of romance, " fighting the 
battles of the English Queen?" 

Bless your heart, yes. The Frenchmen of lower Can- 
ada have never hesitated at helping England fight her 
battles. Within sixteen years after their own disastrous 
defeat before the walls of the citadel city that they loved 
so dearly, they were fighting alongside of their con- 
querors to hold her safe from the attacks of the tre- 
mendously brave, and half-fed little American army 
which ventured north through the fearful rigors of a 
Canadian winter, hopelessly to essay the impossible. 

But our old gentleman was not a soldier. He was a 
seller of cheeses in St. Roch ward, who had retired in 
the sunset of his life. He knew the Quebec of the days 
when the Parliament house stood perched at the ram- 



340 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

parts at the Prescott gate, and the old gateways them- 
selves were narrow impasses at which the traffic of great 
carts and little caleches in summer, and dancing, splen- 
did sleighs in winter, was forever fearfully congested ; 
he could tell many of the romances that still linger up 
this street and down that, within the stout walls of this 
house or in the sheltered garden of some nunnery or 
half-hidden home. He could speak English well, which, 
for a Frenchman in Quebec, is a mark of uncommon 
education. But, best of all, he knew his Quebec. He 
was in a true sense the old Quebec living in the new. 

Even among the cosmopolitan folk of the Terrace in 
the shady late afternoons, you could recognize him as 
such. He was apart from the throng — a motley of 
bare-footed, brown-cloaked friars, full-skirted priests, 
white nuns and gray and black, red-coated soldiers from 
the Citadel to give a sharp note of color to the great 
promenade of Quebec, millionaires real and would-be 
from New York, tourists of every sort from all the 
rest of our land, funny looking English folk from the 
yellow-funnelled Empress, which had just pulled in from 
Liverpool and even now lay resting almost under the 
walls of old Quebec — he was readily distinguished. 
To be with him was, of itself, a matter of distinction. 

To walk the staid streets of the fascinating old town 
with him was a privilege. Always the excursion led to 
new and unexpected turns ; one day up the narrow lane 
and through the impressive gates of the Citadel, where a 
petty officer detained our American cameras and as- 
signed us to a mumbling rear private for perfunctory 
escort around the old place. It is no longer tenanted 
by British troops. The last of these left forty years ago. 
These red-coats are counterfeit ; raw-boned boys from 
Canadian farms being put through their military paces 
by a distant government which may sometimes overlook, 
but not always. The Citadel as a military work is 




H 



CQ 



QUEBEC 341 

tremendously out-of-date. Even as it now stands, it is 
almost a century old, and that tells the story. The guns 
that have so wide a sweep and so exquisite a view from 
the ramparts may look fear-inspiring, but the ramparts 
are of stone and would be quickly vulnerable to modern 
naval ordnance. 

The gun that is unfailingly shown to Americans is a 
small field-piece which is said to have been captured 
from us at Bunker Hill. Whereupon our tourists, with 
a rare gift of repartee, always exclaim: 

" Ah, you may have the gun, but we have the hill ! " 
And the military training of the young Canadian 
militiaman is so perfect that he smiles politely in re- 
sponse. As a matter of fact, there is no record of the 
fact that the gun was ever taken from the Americans, 
although each little while there is a request from the 
States for its return, which is always met with derision 
and scorn by the Canadians. Politics in Our Lady of 
the Snows is almost entirely beyond the understanding 
of an American. 

Sometimes our friend of old Quebec led us to the 
churches of the town — many of them capped with 
roosters upon their steeples, instead of the Roman cross 
which we had believed inevitable with the Catholic 
church. Since then we have been informed that many of 
the Swiss churches of the same faith have that high- 
perched cock upon the steeple-tops. We paused once 
at a new church on the rim of the town, where the very 
old habit of having a nun in constant adoration of the 
Host is perpetuated, paused again at the ever fascinating 
Notre Dame des Victoiries in Lower Town, with its 
battlemented altar and its patriotic legends in French, 
which a British government has been indulgent enough to 
overlook, stood again and again at the wonderful Van 
Dyke which hangs in the clear, cool, white and gold 



342 PERSONALITY OF AAIERICAN CITIES 

Basilica. From the churches, we sometimes went to the 
chapels ; the modern structure of the Seminary, or the 
fascinating holy places of the Ursulines, where the kind- 
hearted Mother Superior turned our attention from the 
imprisoned nuns chanting their prayers behind an altar 
screen, like the decorous and constant hum of honey- 
bees, to the skull of Montcalm. Then we must see his 
burial place in the very spot in the chapel wall cleft 
open by a rampant British shell sent to harass his army. 

" Montcalm," said our gentleman of the old Quebec. 
" He was, sir, the bravest soldier and the finest that 
France ever sent overseas." 

And we could only remember that other fine monu- 
ment of Quebec, out on the Grande Allee toward the 
point where Abraham Martius's cows, chewing their 
cuds on an open plain, awoke one day to find one of the 
world's great battles being fought — almost over their 
very heads. In that creation of marble and of bronze, 
the great figure of Fame is perched aloft, reaching down 
to place her laurel branch upon a real French gentleman 
— Montcalm — at the very hour of his death. That me- 
morial is something more. In a fashion somewhat un- 
usual to monuments, it fairly vitalizes reality. 

There must be a real reason why Quebec is such a 
Mecca for honeymoon journeys. You can see the 
grooms and the brides out on the Terrace, summernight 
after summernight. Romance hovers over that high- 
hung place. It sometimes saunters there of a sunshiny 
morning — a couple here, or a couple there in seemingly 
loving irresponsi1:)iHty as to the fact that ours is a work- 
aday world, after all. It lingers at the afternoon tea, 
along the Terrace promenade. It comes into its own, 
night after night, when the boys and girls of the town 
promenade back and forth to the rhythmical crash of a 



QUEBEC 343 

military band, or in the intervals stand at the rail looking 
down at the rough pattern of street-lights in Lower 
Town, the glistening string of electrics at Levis, or listen- 
ing to the rattle of ship's winches which give a hint that, 
after all, there is a world beyond Quebec. 

When night comes upon the Terrace, one may see it 
at its very best. He may watch the day die over the 
Laurentians, the western sky fill with pink afterglow, 
and the very edge of those ancient peaks sharpen as if 
outlined with an engraver's steel. For a moment, as the 
summer day hesitates there on the threshold of twilight 
and good-by, he may trace the country road that runs 
its course along the north bank of the St. Lawrence 
by the tiny homes of the habitans that line it, he may 
raise his eyes again to the sharp blue profile of the 
mountains. He may hear, as we heard, the old gentle- 
man from St. Roch, whisper as he raises his pointing 
cane : 

" I come here every night and look upon the amphi- 
theater of the gods." 

So it is the night that is the most subtle thing about 
Quebec. It is night when one may hear the bells of all 
the churches that have been a- jangle since early morning 
ring out for vespers before the many altars, the sharp 
report of the evening gun speaking out from the ram- 
parts of the Citadel. After that, silence — the silence 
of waiting. There is a surcease of the chiming bells — 
the Terrace becomes deserted of the army of pleasure- 
seekers who a little time before were making meaning- 
less rotation upon it, the bandmen fall asleep in their 
cell-like casements of the Citadel, the lights of Lower 
Town and of Levis go snuffing out one by one. Silence 
— the silence of waiting. Only the sentinels who pace 
the ramparts of the crumbling fortifications, the occa- 
sional policeman in the narrow street, the white-robed 



DEC i3 1913 

344 PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES 

sister who sits in perpetual adoration of the Sacrament, 
proclaim Quebec awake. Quebec does not sleep. She 
lives, like an aged belle in memory of her triumphs of 
the past, keeps patiently the vigil of the lonely years, and 
awaits the coming of Christ. 



THE END 



FEB 281950 



FEE 



^^ 9.. 



Ci, ' ^ .. -^ 






^^ ^- 



mm 






V- '^^ r-. « ^ 









"-/-I ^ 4 fi s - \V '-O. / » i, ^ 



j^^o^ 



.^..^. 












" '^ 



.^ .^..^^./^\^^^ ^. 












G^^ 



ft 4 S^ A*^ ^ 'y ft ^ s-^ A^ ^^ 



^-^ " \v ^O^ ' ft o s ^ \v Q. ft „ . , 

.' z '^' ^ * ? cP •\^ « , '/" 'V^ 

_ ^ ^ ■- , , 
















■' ..j:^ 9.> 



^-'X 



^\\.s^ ^ 






'ft*s-> .^^ , 












« . ^ ' A*^ <^ ' ' ft « s ^ A<^ ^ ''. 






^0 



^0^ 






^ . 

"^^o^ 



o,^' 



?^ o^ 


















-% .^ .^.^^^ i'^ % ,^' 



\^^ ..0 % 



^- '''ft.^^ \# 9?, ' 






;>:^ <^ '-"^^ ^ ^ "'ftftO A^ <- '^ft.^^ A*^ 















-,#' 



j^ %. -. 



%' 



'h. 





















so 



•^ <- ' ' ^ ^ ^ ^ tip ^ ' ' „ <, s '^ A*^ 









cP 



-^ 












'%.d< 









.^ 



' o -a ^ 



• 1 «^ n , "f^ 



ji 

































^^^. 



■O . 



<x^' 



,^^ ^^ 



^^P \^ 






/\. 






'-^ 



"^^0^ 



£^o^ 



^ o.^^ 



X^ 









^^0< 



V^ 



£^ o^ 






-7 ., "cP 'S^ 



'-6 















c^ Q. 



E^ ^^\%5^r/ J 






,^ ^' ' . ^^' --- 



v^^ 



x^^ 



Cf^ 



r.-^^ 



f^ 









■*^rC{\VA''o -^^qX 












< 









Q. 
'^^ 



~ ^.x^' 



?5 o^. 



Q- 






•^/-v 

*-^- 






?A>< 






.^^ 



% 






''^^ A 









§m 



m 
















i 



